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Former President Donald Trump is apparently distancing himself from the conservative trend of extensively using the word "woke."
Trump suggested that the term was overused by Republicans during a 2024 presidential campaign stop in Iowa on Thursday, complaining that "half the people" who use the term do not even know what it means.
"Woke" has become a culture war buzzword among the political right in recent years. While definitions vary, it is often used as a catchall term to describe political positions or issues of which conservatives do not approve.
Notably, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—Trump's bitter rival in the 2024 GOP presidential primary race—has extensively used the term "woke," introducing the "Stop Woke Act" in his state last year and campaigning on an "anti-woke" platform.
"I don't like the term 'woke,'" Trump said during his speech at the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale, a suburb of Des Moines. "I hear the term 'woke, woke, woke.' It's just a term they use. Half the people can't even define it, they don't know what it is."
Trump went on to suggest that his own definition of "woke" involved transgender athletes, or a hypothetical scenario of men pretending to be transgender women to compete in women's sports.
The former president said that he would have "the greatest" women's basketball team if he could convince NBA star LeBron James and "four or five other big guys" to "become a woman."
"I'll go down as the greatest coach in history," said Trump. "They'll say I was the greatest ever ... and that's all 'woke.' That's all ... I guess they define that as woke, but that's all woke."
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the term "woke" as being "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)."
"It originated in African American English and gained more widespread use beginning in 2014 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement," Merriam-Webster's website states.
"By the end of that same decade it was also being applied by some as a general pejorative for anyone who is or appears to be politically left-leaning," it continues.
Ryan Newman, general counsel for DeSantis, defined "woke" as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them" during a court hearing last year, according to Florida Politics.
DeSantis, whom Trump often refers to with derogatory nicknames like "Ron DeSanctimonious" or "Meatball Ron," has not explicitly defined "woke" himself, despite using the term extensively.
During his second inaugural address in January, the governor told supporters that he rejected "woke ideology" and proclaimed that "Florida is where woke goes to die."
Two Axios Engagious/Schlesinger focus groups conducted in January suggested that Florida residents had significant difficulty in defining what "woke" means.
Regardless of Trump's apparent rejection of the term on Thursday, the former president has recently and repeatedly used "woke" to attack his political opponents.
In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump blasted DeSantis over his war against Disney, arguing that the company had "become a Woke and Disgusting shadow of its former self" due to the governor's policies.
Newsweek has reached out to the office of Trump via email and the DeSantis campaign via its website for comment.
About the writer
Aila Slisco is a Newsweek night reporter based in New York. Her focus is on reporting national politics, where she ... Read more