The Trump administration is making American vocabulary great again, apparently. After President Trump's brief hire of Anthony Scaramucci sent Americans to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary last week to learn about an Italian commedia dell'arte character featured in the Queen song "Bohemian Rhapsody," on Monday the top word looked up at the dictionary site was "kleptocracy," thanks, Merriam-Webster says, to an interview in The Guardian in which former U.S. Office of Government Ethics chief Walter Shaub used the word to describe Trump's mixture of government business and his own private businesses.
Shaub, who resigned last month after his warnings to the White House about Trump and his family repeatedly landed on deaf ears, specifically brought up Trump's liberal and conspicuous use of his own Trump properties and his long-term lease of the historic Old Post Office Building. "The fact that we're having to ask questions about whether he's intentionally using the presidency for profit is bad enough because the appearance itself undermines confidence in government," Shaub told The Guardian. "It certainly risks people starting to refer to us as a kleptocracy. That's a term people throw around fairly freely when they're talking about Russia, fairly or unfairly, and we run the risk of getting branded the same way. America really should stand for more than that."
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