I am confessing up front that I suffer from logophilia. That sounds serious, and it is. It means I love words. I explore their meanings and derivations. I am always on a quest, often fruitless, for precisely the right one in each sentence I write.

That's what makes the term "antifa" so interesting to me. It's a portmanteau, a word that squishes two other words together to create a brand-new one. Like blending breakfast and lunch to make brunch. Or turning a pastry that's half croissant and half donut into a cronut. And combining anti and fascist to become antifa.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first use of "antifa" in a 1946 magazine article: "It is a matter of speculation whether the course of German politics would have been different if 'Antifa' had been encouraged." Here, antifa means standing against fascism.

At age 19, my father was being bombarded by German artillery during World War II. He crossed from France to Germany in the war against Nazi fascism. He was an antifa soldier, as were over 3 million American comrades-in-arms in Europe who fought to save the world from Hitler's murderous and barbaric regime.

On Sept. 22, President Donald Trump issued an executive order designating antifa a "domestic terrorist organization." He is making all this up. During Trump's first term, FBI Director Chris Wray explained to the House Committee on Homeland Security that antifa is not "a group or an organization. It's a movement or an ideology." Even today, it still refers to people who are against fascism. Apparently then, Trump is anti-antifa, opposing those who oppose fascism. If he were born 21 years earlier, in the same year as my father, would he have been fighting for fascism, rather than against it, during World War II?

Something similar seems to be going on with DEI, which stands for diversity, equity and inclusion. On the first day of his second term, Trump ordered the termination of "'diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility' (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government." Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg maintains DEI is about fairness and says, "I don't know a lot of people who think we'd be better off if our lives had more uniformity, inequity ... and exclusion." So, is Trump seeking to return to a time of white male supremacy and the exclusion of others from jobs, housing and college admissions on the basis of their race, religion, national origin and gender? Really? Evidently, that's how Trump would make America great again.

Trump twists words to mean their opposite. This is not new. In Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel "Brave New World," the governmental motto is "Community, Identity, Stability," which really means conformity, loss of individuality and rigid control. That's pretty close to what Trump means when he attacks DEI.

Back in 2018, Trump said, "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening." Although millions saw the violence against law enforcement officers on their TVs and computer screens, Trump described the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as "a day of love." Over seven decades ago, George Orwell anticipated this kind of pronouncement when he wrote in his novel "1984," "In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it." He goes on, "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears."

In Trump's world, being against fascism is bad. Being for inclusion is bad. It's a world where the Environmental Protection Agency rolls back environmental protection against methane emissions. It's a world where the Department of Justice unjustly pursues Trump's enemies, such as former FBI Director James Comey, and frees his supporters, such as the convicted Capitol insurrectionists.

When Trump says, "make America great again," he's asking us to move back to a time of less fairness, less justice, less democracy and more pollution. And tens of millions of Americans are ready to say yes. As Orwell explains in "1984," party members must show "a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this."

Perhaps instead of running a government modeled on dystopian novels, the president should open his Trump-branded Bible and read these words of the Prophet Isaiah: "Woe to those... who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness."

A renaissance man, Keith Raffel has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started a successful internet software company and written five novels, which you can check out at keithraffel.com. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard. To find out more about Keith and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at creators.com.

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