Is this a vocabulary deficit? A real estate developer buzzword, such as “spacious” or “walk-in pantry”? Is this a manifestation, a linguistic trick to make it appear that everything is better than fine? In college, did he fulfill a gen ed requirement with a course on the history of aesthetics?

I have gone down a rabbit hole. Did you know that there is a whole field called phonaesthetics, which is the study of how pleasing words are to the ear? Unpleasing sounds are called “cacophonous”; pleasing words are “euphonious.” One of the fathers of this field was J.R.R. Tolkien (yes, that one), who taught English at the University of Oxford and worked on the Oxford English Dictionary and declared that the most melodious word combination in English was “cellar door.” Words are more likely to be thought of as euphonious if they have three or more syllables, with the stress on the first syllable. The most euphonious letter is “l,” followed by “m,” “s” and “n”; the most euphonious vowel sounds are short rather than long.

“Beautiful” fits many of those criteria, which makes me wonder if it’s as simple as that. Trump is human, like the rest of us, and he is just as drawn to pleasing words as any of us, and “beautiful” is a more pleasing word than, say, “pretty” — though not as pleasing as “luminous.”

Then again, the Oxford English Dictionary — and I just paid $10 for a subscription to learn this, so now I have to share it with you — says that “beautiful,” in terms of usage, is about as common as the words “facility,” “solve” and “travel,” and Trump definitely doesn’t use those words with any noteworthy frequency. The OED also tells me that the word peaked in 1850. By 1946, when Trump was born, it was in a steep decline and reached its lowest usage point in 1980, when Trump was 34 years old and a television interviewer was first asking the young tycoon whether he’d ever consider running for president.

Trump uses “beautiful” to describe sleeping gas (“They have a gas that’s a beautiful sleeping gas”). He uses it to describe fossil fuels (“clean, beautiful coal”). He uses it to describe his unrealized health-care plans, airports, his physical body (“If I took this shirt off, you’d see a beautiful, beautiful person”). Politico published a list last year aggregating weird times he’s used the word, and until I clicked on it, I had almost forgotten about when he celebrated the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by praising “a dog, a beautiful dog” and also the “beautiful, big hole” created by the U.S. military when it blasted through Baghdadi’s house during a raid.

I spend a lot of time preoccupied with language: how it works and why it works and whom it works for. What I think I find most jarring about Trump and “beautiful” is how many times he uses the word to describe something I find to be the opposite. He tweets about the removal of “beautiful” Confederate statues and monuments — but it doesn’t matter how regal the statues look, because they represent something nauseating and tragic. Trump posts an AI-generated video depicting a resort built on the rubble of Gaza, and the resort is supposed to be beautiful, but it just feels horrifying.

The wall he wants to build along the southern border has long been described as “beautiful” by him, but it is not beautiful by any aesthetic measure — Trump is on the record as hating brutalist architecture — so he can mean only that the function itself, keeping people out of America, is what is beautiful. You might think of a lot of descriptors for immigration policy; you might even find stronger border control necessary or worthy. But most of us wouldn’t describe sending desperate people back to dangerous, impoverished lives as beautiful. There is a smugness to the word in that context; it is cruel.

To be told that something is beautiful when it seems ugly to you is not a linguistic problem — it’s a worldview problem. An essential problem of figuring out how to build a society. It’s not gaslighting, exactly, but it leads to cognitive dissonance, to looking out the window and wondering how other people can see what you’re seeing and think it looks so radically different, or if they’re even seeing the same thing at all. Do we think it’s beautiful to make it harder for families to see doctors when they’re sick? To make it harder to feed their children? Is it beautiful to make it easier to buy gun silencers? Is it beautiful to charge asylum seekers $1,000 to apply for safety?

“Beautiful” is an adjective that describes a thing, but it’s also a reflection on the person using it: what they care about, what they think is worth saving. Whether they place more value in something seeming appealing than being intrinsically good.

Which brings me to the reason I am writing this. Trump has named his signature agenda — which the House has passed, which the Senate will consider, which will form and shape America and determine our values — the One Big Beautiful Bill.

The Big Beautiful Bill works for Donald Trump because it uses a common, euphonious word to sell a tantalizing concept: that the federal government is simple instead of being a giant, complicated mess — but one that got that way for a reason. To fix it, you don’t need wonks, economists, the swamp, the “deep state,” lawyers, laws or elaborate tax codes; you just need to clonk it upside the head with the Big Beautiful Bill.

The “the” is intentional. The Big Beautiful Bill is the One Ring of legislation, the only bill you’ll ever need. “Big Beautiful Bill” is a phrase that could lull you into believing it contained only good things. And it does not.