Trump Admits Republicans Don’t Even Know What ‘Woke’ Means

During a Thursday campaign event in Iowa, former President Donald Trump admitted what we all know: Republicans have no idea what “woke” actually means.

“I don’t like the term ‘woke,'” Trump said while answering questions from the audience, “because I hear the term ‘woke woke woke’ — it’s just a term they use, half the people can’t define it, they don’t know what it is.”

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The former president then rambled about transgender athletes and claimed that if he were the coach of a girl’s basketball team he “would have the greatest team. I’d say ‘Lebron [James], would you like to become a woman?’ And I would go to another four or five guys and say we will be undefeated for many, many years.’ I will go down as the greatest coach in history.”

“It is so crazy — and that is all woke,” Trump said. “I guess they define that as woke, but that’s all woke.”

For right-wing politicians and pundits, the term “woke” has become an amorphous shorthand for anything deemed too progressive, too inclusive, or too considerate of minorities. It’s intentionally ambiguous because a lack of clarity gives them the freedom to slap the label on literally whatever they want.

Need an example? Earlier this week conservatives urged a boycott against Chick-fil-A, a long-time corporate darling of conservatives who’ve celebrated the fast food chain’s Christian values, for the “woke” crime of having a diversity and inclusion policy.

Trump’s statement, however, is likely a direct response to the anti-”woke” hysteria of his chief 2024 primary opponent Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor has made vanquishing the “woke mind virus” a central tenant of not only his governance of the Sunshine State but of his candidacy for the presidency.

The night he officially announced his entry into the Republican primary, DeSantis appeared on Fox News, where he declared that “the woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism,” and an “attack on the truth.”

“We have no choice but to wage a war on woke,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis also vowed to “destroy Leftism in this country and leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history,” earlier this week.

On Thursday morning, during his own campaign event in New Hampshire, DeSantis asked if anybody was “happy to see this woke mind virus affect all these institutions?” What he means, he did not bother to clarify.

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