President Donald Trump is pushing his preferred vocabulary for artificial intelligence across his administration, and he is no longer treating the wording as a simple branding choice. He now says the White House considers people who reject his preferred term to be enemies.

The campaign surfaced publicly a couple of weeks ago when Sebastian Gorka, a controversial White House adviser, appeared on Newsmax. Host Ed Henry began asking about the administration’s approach to the international race involving artificial intelligence technology.

Before Henry could finish the question, Gorka interrupted him to impose the administration’s new terminology. “No, no, no, no,” he told Henry. “Sorry, it’s ‘SI.’ As of this week, it’s ‘Super Intelligence.’”

That interruption was not an isolated bit of messaging. A few days later, Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, appeared on CNN and received a question from host Jake Tapper about talks with China regarding AI.

Waltz offered the same correction rather than simply answering with the familiar term. “Well, we’re going with ‘super intelligence’ now, Jake,” Waltz replied.

The language campaign soon moved beyond television appearances by administration officials. Earlier this week, Justice Department and State Department officials were instructed to adopt Trump’s preferred branding in all of their official work.

Trump then escalated the effort himself. Politico reported that the president said Thursday that the White House would consider anyone refusing to use “super intelligence” instead of artificial intelligence to be “the enemy.”

“The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” Trump said on Truth Social.

The declaration goes well beyond asking officials to use a particular phrase. Trump is attaching political hostility to an ordinary and widely recognized term, presenting resistance to his preferred wording as evidence that someone belongs in an enemy camp.

The episode also fits a broader pattern described in the article. If recent history offers any indication, Trump could take a similar approach toward people who continue referring to the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario and Denali by names he does not prefer.

The spectacle invites an unmistakable comparison to George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984.” In the novel, an authoritarian regime adopts politically motivated words and phrases, then imposes that language on the public as a means of crushing independent thought.

Orwell called the regime’s manufactured vocabulary “newspeak,” while the English language was relegated to “oldspeak.” Social media did not exist in Orwell’s fictional world, but a declaration branding opponents of imposed language as enemies would hardly feel out of place there.

This effort to police words has been a staple of Team Trump politics for far too long. The administration has held up science grant proposals when they include the word “gender,” which Republican officials apparently view as a red flag.

Trump has also said people are not “allowed” to reference coal unless the word is preceded by “clean and beautiful.” He carried that insistence so far that he corrected a child during a Christmas Eve call late last year.

A court filing revealed another example involving Head Start programs. According to that filing, the Trump administration created a six page list of banned words that Head Start locations cannot use when describing their programs, including “disability” and “race.”

The hypocrisy is difficult to miss. Much of the political right recently treated concerns about “speech codes” and “language rules” as proof that “woke” politics had spun out of control and become a threat to free speech.

Now, a new form of conservative political correctness is taking hold through official instructions and presidential declarations. The same crowd that once loudly condemned language policing has become remarkably quiet as Trump demands obedience to his own preferred vocabulary.

The criticism was written by Steve Benen, a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. Benen is also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”