In the UK the received wisdom, long after the pager disappeared, remains that success is defined by the clarity and unity of the message. The imminent electoral failure for any party is invariably signalled by the spectacle of MPs and ministers going off on constituency-courting sprees of their own. Yet new incumbents in Downing Street, buoyed by a fresh mandate, still understand coherence as the route to public respect.

Across the Atlantic, however, Donald Trump has now smashed the tried-and-tested delivery system. In its place comes something much more complex, apparently chaotic and instinctively manipulative: the “multi-message”. In place of details he generates “vibes” and his message is spread by a broad cast of actors, only some of whom have formal political roles or are even nominally accountable to the American public.

All the while, unelected figures from Elon Musk to Joe Rogan keep alive a bubbling, rolling dialogue on X and YouTube, setting the tone for the Trumpian take on any given topic, even before the President himself has officially adopted it. Trump himself is adept at sending out multiple signals, often shifting position or contradicting himself. The perpetual uncertainty generated by this approach, accelerated by its rapid delivery on social media, has a destabilizing, mesmerizing effect on domestic opponents and potential foreign allies alike.

Individual members of Trump’s entourage, particularly Musk, are effectively licensed to crash through all previously accepted boundaries of political protocol and veracity. In January, for instance, the technocrat’s relentless and baseless online attacks on Keir Starmer’s history as director of public prosecutions represented outrageous libels that 10 or even five years ago would have placed the accuser beyond the pale.

Musk — despite wild attacks on friendly heads of state, his energetic support of the far-Right AfD in Germany, or even his admission that “some of the things I say will be incorrect” — remains Trump’s most visible henchman. Yet when the President himself talked about Starmer later that same month, he was warm and emollient. “I get along with him well,” he said. “I like him a lot. He’s liberal, which is a bit different from me, but I think he’s a very good person and he’s done a very good job so far.” In Trump’s world, such a statement is not at all incompatible with his closest political ally’s false accusation that Starmer is guilty of heinous moral crimes for which he should be literally imprisoned.

Such is the nature of the multi-message, which depends on the unbolting of speech from verifiable truth, and the unapologetic liberation of rhetoric from consistency. In America’s new sphere, with Trump at its heart, the primary function of speech is not to build a shared understanding towards a common purpose but rather to produce an effect. The intended effect of Musk’s attacks, pumped out to millions online, was to smear Starmer’s reputation and weaken his popular support. Meanwhile, Trump’s praise was aimed at peeling Starmer away from potential European allies, while dangling the hope that cultivating a warm personal relationship with the President might protect the UK from economic tariffs. While these two messages might appear contradictory, they have a unified logic: a weakened prime minister, who is nonetheless fighting to defend his country’s interests, is more liable to agree to demands which he might otherwise refuse. This logic of dual effect is why Trump never chided Musk for his intemperate comments.

For adherents of the old post-war politics, the newly fluid, multi-message order is proving disorienting. So too is its orchestration and staging. Take, for instance, the recent, acrimonious Oval Office meeting between Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump and his Vice President JD Vance. Despite what some more credulous observers may have believed, it was clearly very far from a spontaneous personality clash which erupted out of nowhere.

For months beforehand, Musk and Donald Trump Jr had laid the groundwork by assiduously promoting contempt for Zelensky online, sharing memes which mocked and belittled him. They presented him as a chancer and supplicant, the Home Alone 2 kid intent on fleecing Trump and the US taxpayer for the defense of a corrupt administration. On his podcast last November, Rogan expressed his furious impatience over Ukraine’s resistance to a Russian invasion. “Fuck you people!” he cried. “You people are about to start World War Three!” Earlier this year, meanwhile, Trump dubbed Zelensky “a dictator without elections” on Truth Social (despite the practical impossibility of holding elections in the midst of war) and suggested that Kyiv “never should have started it” (despite Russia being the invader).

A few days later, though, General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy in Ukraine, met Zelensky and praised him as “the embattled and courageous leader of a nation at war” — something which may have reflected Kellogg’s genuine opinion, but also offered worried European leaders a strand of reassurance. At the same time, Musk called Zelensky “a fraud machine feeding off dead bodies of soldiers”. Yet when Trump was asked about calling Zelensky a “dictator” during Keir Starmer’s visit to the White House, he dissimulated. “Did I say that?” he asked aloud. “I can’t believe I said that.” The head-spinning, multi-message mechanism for smear, distraction and disinformation was in full swing.

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It’s in this context that we come to Trump’s infamous meeting with Zelensky at the White House. It was purportedly arranged to sign a deal with Trump for the extraction of Ukrainian minerals — though, as yet, without any assurances of US protection if Putin reinvaded after a ceasefire. The descent into wider ill humor was triggered by a question over sartorial etiquette. “Why don’t you wear a suit?” one reporter suddenly asked Zelensky. “Do you own a suit?”

This strange interjection can be understood by who that journalist was. Brian Glenn works for the “Real America’s Voice” cable network, and is the partner of the far-Right Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. He was a recent addition to the White House press pool after Trump banned the Associated Press, took over control of access from the White House Correspondents’ Association, and hand-picked a number of supportive outlets from outside “legacy media”. It is frankly inconceivable that Glenn would ask such an aggressive question of a foreign dignitary without prior sanction from the very top, a suspicion intensified by the wink which Trump aimed at the reporter after his question.

As JD Vance escalated the argument, accusing Zelensky of disrespect and ingratitude, Trump weighed in with the same language as Rogan: “You’re gambling with World War Three!” The US president’s subsequent remark — “this is going to be great television” — was a pat on the back for his own orchestrated reality, casting a dignified Zelensky, attempting in a second language to correct untruths, in the role of a grifting ingrate. But a staged row, followed by a peremptory dismissal, is territory in which Trump feels comfortable: his long-running role in The Apprentice was his bridge to his first successful run at the presidency.

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There’s another parallel, too, with the way in which the Trump administration advances its aims: the coercive control of the domestic abuser. Such people are masters of the shifting multi-message: first charming, then cruel; gaslighting, insulting and complimenting; denying things they said, and keeping the more vulnerable person invested with promises of a future together, while chipping away at their external friendships and sense of self. This is not a comparison that should offend the administration, since members of Trump’s circle apparently helped facilitate the flight to the US from Romania of the misogynist online influencer Andrew Tate, who has often boasted about pimping and abusing women, and is being investigated in the UK for rape and human trafficking. The action has sparked outrage from the Republican governor of Florida, where Tate arrived.

An idea common to many victims of abuse, at least for a time, is that if you only play the abusers’ tightening game very carefully, you will be all right where others aren’t. Keep smiling, give him all the things he likes, speak softly, don’t wind him up. Something of this can be spotted in commentary about Zelensky: he should have humored Trump and Vance, critics say, instead of trying to correct their false assertions. But to argue this is to miss the point. Starmer’s visit went well largely because the Trump team wanted it to, and Zelensky’s imploded for the same reason.

The supposed offense given by Zelensky will be used as an excuse to further sideline Ukraine from a future US-Russia deal. Trump’s performative exasperation — “America will not put up with it for much longer!” — has already been used to suspend US military arms to Ukraine, and to press Zelensky into a minerals deal without a security guarantee. It should not go unnoticed that Musk’s new demand is that the US should leave NATO.

There is a warning here for Britain. It is time to wake up from the last woozy traces of anesthetic concerning the historic “special relationship” with a clear-eyed understanding of the malign profundity of the change in Washington. Even as the UK’s survival strategy is under construction, it really needs to start reading the multi-message.

Writing in the 1920s, DH Lawrence had foreseen it all. The son of a miner, he hated industrialism, which he believed had “frustrated that sense of community that would make us all unite in pride and dignity”. Politics had no solutions; it dealt in meaningless abstraction, rather than ordinary feeling. Talking with political activists, Lawrence observed, “is like trying to have a human conversation with the letter x in algebra”.

Exiled from Britain after the First World War, he set off an a “savage pilgrimage” before tuberculosis finally caught up with him. By 1930, he was dead. It was up to a new generation of writers, each in their own way inspired by Lawrence, to respond to his challenge to politics. They are the subject of Marc Stears’s new book Out of the Ordinary, which shows how the likes of George Orwell, JB Priestley, and Dylan Thomas rejected the abstract ideologies of their day. In using a language that was concrete and specific, Stears argues, they created a new vision for politics.

A political academic and former speechwriter for Ed Miliband, Stears believes that revisiting the output of these writers in the 1940s can provide a solution to our polarised present moment. The technocratic politics of the Blair and Cameron years have left Britain divided. Populism, both on the Left and Right, has failed to offer a convincing solution to years of economic inequality and political gridlock. For Stears, the answer is a politics of what he calls “the ordinary” and “everyday life”.

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In Stears’s account, Orwell, Priestley and Thomas rejected Lawrence’s “abstract idealisms”, refusing to fall, as Thomas puts it, “for the latest isms like pups for rubber bones”. For Orwell, vague and abstract language was the source of his era’s “political chaos”. It allowed politicians to manipulate the truth, and in its worst instances, to justify murder.

They eschewed the pessimism of the Right, too, and what they saw as grandiose ideas of Britishness. Priestley attacked what he called “Big Englanders”, Orwell hated “Rule Britannia” and flag-waving officer types, while Thomas loathed Elgar.

Instead, they aspired to a language that was tangible and rooted in people’s everyday lives and experiences. For Thomas, “the everyday” lay in memories of his childhood in Swansea: “the pubs and clubs, billiards rooms, promenades, and the suburban nights”. For Priestley, in “filling stations and factories”, “arterial and by-pass roads”, and “bungalows with tiny garages”, while Orwell associated ordinariness with “solid breakfasts, gloomy Sundays, smoky towns, winding roads, and green fields”.

When the Second World War broke out, Stears argues, these writers were forced to reconcile their sense of unease with conventional ideas of Britishness. In doing so, they turned their commitment to specificity into something of popular substance. Priestley’s Postscripts challenged Churchill for radio listeners; Orwell commissioned programmes for the BBC in India; Thomas wrote radio plays and film scripts.

After the War, however, the country failed to unite around this vision: Attlee built the welfare state from the top down, while successive governments — both Labour and Conservative — enfeebled local government. Politics become increasingly technocratic and distant from everyday concerns. All the things that once connected politics to everyday life, from trade union branches to local newspapers, began to disappear.

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This is a compelling account, but how applicable are the insights of these long-dead writers to contemporary politics? Today’s politics has arguably become more, not less, abstract. Indeed, we live in an increasingly abstract world, where things that were once solid — from telephone booths to paper money — have melted into an intangible digital world.

In his book, Stears recalls a conversation with a Labour pollster who, in the 2015 election campaign, told him that people valued spending time with loved ones more than any other issue. Nothing else came close. When Stears asked him why the party didn’t make this more of a focus, he was told this — the issue that matters most to people — isn’t what politics is about.

But if politics feels distant from people’s everyday preoccupations, it is because its language so often fails to connect. Both Left and Right talk of “equality”, “responsibility” and “aspiration”: vague, abstract words with no relevance to people’s lived experience. Even when politicians try to resolve these problems, their language fails to bring ordinary people onside. “Social mobility” and “levelling up” are phrases almost unheard outside the corridors of Westminster.

This linguistic emptiness means that politics is, as the philosopher Simone Weil wrote, increasingly “peopled exclusively by myths and monsters”. The slipperiness of abstract words means they can “represent for us an absolute reality”, while, at the same time, “mean anything whatsoever”. We reach for abstractions to explain systems of belief and ideologies: “fascism”, “sovereignty”, “patriotism”. But too often these words are manipulated to smear political opponents or shut down debate. When this happens, the common ground erodes and polarisation becomes inevitable.

The Conservative Party’s risible “war on woke” is a case in point. “Woke” is a meaningless expression often used by proponents as a commitment to vaguely progressive ideals. For its detractors, however, “woke” is nothing short of the 21^st century’s answer to Bolshevism. If we cannot even agree the meaning of a word, substantive argument becomes impossible. A “war on woke” is like trying to catch a phantom. And when only 4% of the public know what a culture war actually is, the chase is futile, too.

And if conventional political language loses its purchase on ordinary life, voters will look for unconventional politicians to fill the vacuum. When Donald Trump, for instance, pledged to “build a big, beautiful wall”, his language couldn’t have been more concrete. This was ordinary language at its most ordinary. Trump was electable because he refused to obey the conventions of politics and speak its jargon.

That isn’t to say that Trump-style populists are the solution to this crisis. Instead, if we are to develop a politics that can connect with voters’ lived experience, specificity is a place to start. Rather than gesturing vaguely to “community”, for example, we should talk about the institutions that facilitate one: affordable housing, for instance; access to fields or parks; pubs, shops, places of worship and schools.

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Politics will never be entirely free of abstractions, of course. For politicians, abstract language will always remain a useful tool to paper over the divisions that run through parties. Concrete language leads to firm promises, which are hard to keep. And disregarding all vague words would, as Orwell acknowledges, lead to a kind of “political quietism” where big ideas could not be debated at all. What’s more, phrases like “the ordinary” and “the everyday” are themselves abstractions, with different associations for different people.

But a concern for the everyday would, in Stears’s view, bring politics closer to people’s lived experiences. He believes it might help convince them that policy is not something irrelevant and aloof from their daily lives, but something that can be created by them, and in their own image.

In the meantime, what’s certain is that too often, politics feels like a poor substitute for the things that actually concern us: decent work, relationships, health, and a good place to live. If we could move politics closer to these concerns, we would go some way to solving many of the great challenges of our age.