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Peter Himmelman's Substack
What follows is not a political or theological essay, though it borrows from both in order to make a point about the effect of language, whether positive or negative.
In the High Holiday prayers we say something both profound and unsettling: “God chooses kings.” Power is not random, and leadership is not accidental. Kings appear not only to rule, but to reveal, which means we must ask what we are meant to learn from our chosen “kings”—or, in our age, the presidents we have democratically elected.
Especially now, it is worth questioning both the implications and the outcomes when the so-called kings of our moment are figures whose language often sows division, whose speech is harsh, demeaning, and confrontational. When governance becomes cudgel, when enforcement skirts the boundaries of legality, and when performance replaces conversation, something fundamental shifts. This is what I am writing about today: language—not as spin, but as a moral force that shapes the inner dimensions of a society long before it shapes its laws and the ways those laws are enforced.
As someone who understands and strongly supports the need for border security as a prerequisite to national sovereignty, I have wondered about the following disparities.
Between 2009 and 2016, the United States under Obama deported roughly three million people (using the broader definition in place at the time)—more than under any administration in modern history. Between 2017 and 2020, under Trump, the number was far lower, closer to 800,000. In the current administration, deportations have resumed but have not approached those earlier levels. And yet, the removals during the Obama years occurred with relatively little sustained public unrest, while today, and during the early Trump term, deportations have been accompanied by mass protest, violence including killings, and civic breakdown.
Why is this?
The difference cannot be explained by numbers alone. Nor can it be explained by policy alone. It can be explained, at least in part, by two factors. The first was the national media at the time, which broadly conveyed an observable bias in favor of the Obama administration and its policies, resulting in quiet acquiescence. The second, and this is significant, was the use of language.
During Obama’s administration, enforcement was largely spoken about as targeted, focusing on recent border crossers and people with criminal convictions. That framing mattered. The language surrounding deportation emphasized necessity and restraint rather than threat. It was not brash or belittling. Even as the removals were devastating to those affected, they were described in ways that acknowledged complexity and loss. The words used to describe enforcement kept the damage from spreading outward, preventing a spiral of diminishing returns: border security set against civil unrest. As a result, the policy rarely metastasized into a national moral reckoning, not because the suffering was less, but because temperate language helped to restrain the reaction.
It is worth noting how different this sounded from what came later. Obama’s language around enforcement, however imperfect the policy itself, was framed as reluctant necessity—law carried out with restraint, often accompanied by acknowledgment of human cost. By contrast, Trump’s language recast enforcement as performative and domineering. Immigrants were no longer people caught in a broken system, but threats to be neutralized, problems to be expelled, symbols to be used, even when they were long-settled, non-violent, and had committed no serious crimes. The policy remained largely the same. The language did not. And that difference matters more than we give it credit for.
Words are not decorative. They are not neutral. They are the medium through which power moves from intention to action. They set the moral temperature of every culture, every relationship, and every human interaction. Long before a policy is enforced, it is spoken into being..
Language, in this sense, is not a matter of etiquette. It is the difference between law and vengeance, between authority and domination. Some will argue that none of this matters in the face of real violence, that bullets and batons are the only facts worth discussing. But that misunderstands how violence works. Physical violence is rarely the first step. It is almost always the last. It comes after language has already done its empathy-degrading work, after people have been rhetorically stripped of their humanity.
Words are prelude.
I know of a man who was deported during the Obama administration. He worked at a restaurant where several undocumented workers were employed. Immigration agents came, he was taken, jailed, and given twenty-four hours to pack his belongings before being sent across the border. He knew he was in the country illegally. He wanted a better life. He believed, perhaps naively, that if he stayed long enough, things might work out. They did not. When asked if he was angry, he said he was not. He was sad. He understood what had happened and why. And this is the part that matters: he was not demeaned in the process. He was not told he was a criminal by nature or a threat by definition. He was not folded into a caricature of maleficence. The loss was real, but humiliation was not added to it. The outcome was the same, but the experience was different, and that difference is instructive today.
This is where Minneapolis enters the story. The protests are not abstractions; they are, in part, a response to a language that has led to bodies, to blood, to visible loss. As with nearly all mass protests, some have remained peaceful and others have not. But the fury is not only about the deaths themselves. When a demonstrably peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights is met with rhetoric from a federal government that seeks to humiliate, that administration weakens its claim to legitimacy.
And this returns us to the question of kings. In Jewish tradition, we do not learn only from righteous rulers. We often learn even more from corrupt ones. Perhaps this is why the liturgy suggests that God chooses kings at times as an endorsement, and at other times as a method of elucidation. A child raised with love learns how to love, but a child raised in cruelty or neglect may learn something equally powerful: how not to raise a child. And when that child becomes a parent, they will not need a manual. They already carry the negative image of the past in their bones. They know instinctively that their task is to do the opposite.
So what are we being taught by the leader we have now? Might we be learning the danger of language untethered from restraint, of power that speaks before it thinks, power that replaces reasoned argument with force of personality? Might we be shown, in dramatic fashion, what happens when words become weapons rather than bridges?
If so, then one of the first mistakes we make is to misunderstand the nature of the danger itself. Let me clarify something often said too casually: that such leaders suffer from delusions of grandeur. That phrase does not quite apply. If a barista believes she is the most powerful woman on earth, that is a delusion. If a man unloading potatoes at the co-op believes the world bends to his will, that is a disorder of perception. But the President of the United States, who commands armies, shapes markets, and alters the fate of millions, does not suffer from delusions of grandeur. His power is real. The problem lies elsewhere: not in believing oneself powerful, but in speaking as though power alone is justification.
When speech no longer carries moral arguments but issues denunciatory declarations, it teaches the false and dangerous notion that force is clarity, that humiliation is strength, that leadership is threat.
Perhaps this is the lesson we receive from such kings, not what to follow but what to outgrow, not what to emulate but what to repair, and to do so peacefully. Perhaps the task of the citizen, like the task of the healed child, is to look squarely at what harmed them and say, I will not pass this on. If that is so, then this moment is a test of national and personal maturity.
What we do with the language we inherit now, whether we repeat it, soften it, or refuse it, will determine what kind of society we become, and what kind of world our children will one day either rejoice in or be forced to undo.
