Editor’s Note: Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history and director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics” and the forthcoming “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.” She cohosts the history podcasts “Past Present” and “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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Merriam-Webster has named “gaslighting” its word of the year.
The decision to crown “gaslighting” in 2022 may feel a little late. The term became the go-to way of describing former President Donald Trump’s devotion to creating false realities through repeated lies all the way back in 2016. As one of the first people to apply the term to Trump’s rejection of reality (in a viral piece for US News & World Report in March 2016), I’ve paid attention as the word entered the political lexicon and broadened until it became, essentially, a synonym of “lying.”
But in that broadening, something has been lost. A particular moment spurred me to think of Trump’s habitual dissembling in gaslighting terms. A week before I wrote that column, video appeared to show Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski roughly grabbing Breitbart writer Michelle Fields, forcing her out of his way after a press conference. (After battery charges were filed by police, the state’s attorney decided there was not enough evidence to pursue criminal charges. Lewandowski denied touching Fields.)
The incident was filmed and the video widely circulated. Yet when I came home and turned on the news that night, there was Trump, denying that it had happened. I was so confused that I hopped online to make sure I hadn’t mistaken what I had seen (I was not yet acclimated to Trump’s steady stream of lies).
The disorientation I felt in that moment reminded me of gaslighting, a term derived from the 1938 play “Gas Light” (later turned into a film), which depicted a husband psychologically torturing his wife to the point that she questions her own grasp of reality. In the cases of both “Gas…
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