One way you can tell the Republican Party is a full-on personality cult is that his flaks all talk like AI machines programmed solely with Trump’s social media feeds:

In March, Axios reported that Donald Trump’s Oval Office had begun to resemble an Oscar night gift suite, as world leaders and business officials knew that showing up empty-handed risked earning Trump’s displeasure. In response to the news outlet’s catalogue of favors visitors bestowed on the president in such meetings, a White House spokesperson declared, “President Trump is a masterful negotiator and is using his astute business acumen to reshape our economy and reinvigorate American economic dominance. Companies and countries are being forced to come to the table and retreat from their America Last policies and once again are betting on America.”

This was, of course, ridiculous—a hamfisted bit of propaganda that did not address the allegations in the story and was designed to convince no one. It did, however, do what a lot of statements from Trump administration spokespeople are meant to: telegraph defiance, display a swaggering disregard for the basic tenets of reality, and, of course, curry favor with the president. Welcome to the age of the hyper-aggressive, doggedly loyal flack, who is fluent in one language: Trumpese.

One true and neutral thing to be said about Donald Trump is that he’s transformed how his fans and imitators use the English language. Trump’s love of adverbs, bloviation, grandiosity, exaggeration, baldfaced lies, weird metaphors, and hatred of windmills has been the subject of endless commentary across the last decade. Over that time, the way he talks has increasingly seeped down to the people who seek to emulate him—or at least to keep their jobs in his employ. In his second term, with his chaotically malign agenda in hyperdrive, Trumpese is being used to full effect by government spokespeople, who often answer even the most benign of requests for comment with absurdly aggressive (and often comically untrue) responses.