Opinion: Trump’s all-caps rage is back. Has America changed?

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Poetry’s genius is that it offers both an endless supply of words and a fresh way of looking at everything under the sun. As an example, the word “majusculation” – from the noun “majuscule,” meaning upper case or capital lettering (the inverse of “miniscule”) – in poetry refers to the capitalization of the first letter in every line of a poem.

Poet and essayist Sumita Chakraborty has written that this convention of language “can give a poem majesty; the poem seems to stand upright, with all of its oblique and elliptical utterances yoked to the vertebrae of its left margin.”

If the poet’s use of capital letters can provide coherence – a figurative backbone – to a disordered world, it seems that former President Donald Trump’s haphazard capitalizations in his 14-page response to the House January 6 select committee on Friday did the opposite.

Trump’s rage at the committee’s decision to subpoena him for documents and testimony about his role in the insurrection found voice in an all-caps opening line repeating his mendacious claims about the 2020 election. Thereafter, his upper cases were directed incoherently at enemies and allies alike – “Hacks and Thugs” and “American Patriots.”

The chaos of Trump’s slapdash majuscules was one tiny measure of linguistic turmoil; this week, Americans were asked to confront much greater mayhem – yet again – when the January 6 committee held its last hearing before the midterm elections. In never-before-seen footage from that day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders were shown “scrambling to obtain more police and national guard forces to repel the rioters on Capitol Hill as they realized the threat was unfolding – not only to their personal safety but also to their ability to carry out their constitutional function of certifying the election,” wrote Julian Zelizer.

After four months of highly staged televised hearings, Zelizer concluded: “The committee successfully unpacked the dark days that followed the 2020 election. They have been…