Former President Donald Trump is seemingly staying away from the conservative trend of extensively using the word “woke.”
Trump had suggested that the term was overused by Republicans during a 2024 presidential campaign stop in Iowa on Thursday, complaining that “half the people” who use the term do not even know what it means.
It has been note that the word “Woke” has become a culture war buzzword among the political right in recent years. The definitions vary and it is often used as a catchall term to describe political positions or issues of which conservatives do not approve.
Notably, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—Trump’s bitter rival in the 2024 GOP presidential primary race—has extensively used the term “woke,” introducing the “Stop Woke Act” in his state last year and campaigning on an “anti-woke” platform.
“I don’t like the term ‘woke,'” Trump said during his speech at the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale, a suburb of Des Moines. “I hear the term ‘woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use. Half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”
Trump went on to suggest that his own definition of “woke” involved transgender athletes, or a hypothetical scenario of men pretending to be transgender women to compete in women’s sports.
The former president stated that he would have “the greatest” women’s basketball team if he could convince NBA star LeBron James and “four or five other big guys” to “become a woman.”
“I’ll go down as the greatest coach in history,” said Trump. “They’ll say I was the greatest ever … and that’s all ‘woke.’ That’s all … I guess they define that as woke, but that’s all woke.”
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the term “woke” as being “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”
“It originated in African American English and gained more widespread use beginning in 2014 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement,” Merriam-Webster’s website states.
“By the end of that same decade it was also being applied by some as a general pejorative for anyone who is or appears to be politically left-leaning,” it continues.
During a campaign event in Iowa, Trump complains that "half the people" who use the term "woke" can't define it — and then says that if he got Lebron James and 4 other NBA players to identify as women that would be "woke" pic.twitter.com/VsM1SXm31O
— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) June 1, 2023
