As the second month of the war in Iran unfolds, Donald Trump and his team aren’t just eyeing targets in the Middle East, they’re also taking aim at the dictionary.

In recent weeks, the president and his administration have tried to change the plain meaning of all kinds of words and phrases. In this White House, for example, “unconditional surrender” apparently no longer means unconditional surrender. Similarly, the meaning of “war,” “excursion,” “spreading,” “contained,” “imminent” and “no quarter” have all been abused beyond what sense will tolerate, reinforcing concerns that the deadly conflict is, among other things, an elaborate exercise in untethering words from their meanings.

In a piece for The Bulwark, Will Saletan explained, “Donald Trump’s war in Iran has shocked and confused people around the world, including foreign officials. One reason might be that many of these people learned English before Trump came to power. In Trump’s war, words no longer mean what they used to mean.”

But perhaps no phrase has been targeted with the vigor and enthusiasm as “regime change.” On Tuesday morning, for example, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth boasted during a press briefing that “regime change has occurred” in Iran.

A day earlier, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt used similar language, arguing that there’s been “regime change” in Iran because so many Iranian officials have been killed as part of the war.

The president, meanwhile, has begun pushing a similar message on a nearly daily basis. On Sunday night, for example, during a Q&A with reporters on Air Force One, he declared, “We’ve had regime change.”

Pressed on the point, he added, “We’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before. It’s a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change.”

Of course, what Trump would consider isn’t altogether relevant: Either there’s been regime change in Iran or there hasn’t. And by most objective measures, “regime change” has been understood to mean a fundamental shift, not only in individual leaders, but in the nature of a country’s legal and governmental structure.

In the United States, when one presidential administration succeeds another after an election, different individuals occupy various positions of authority, but that doesn’t reflect “regime change” (in any credible definition of the phrase). The U.S. is still a constitutional republic in which one set of leaders replaces another. Our system of government remains intact, even as power shifts from one group to another.

Similarly, for nearly a half-century, Iran has been led by religious clerics and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. More than a month into the war, Iran is still led by religious clerics and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

There’s no great mystery as to the motivation here: The war hasn’t exactly gone as smoothly as the White House hoped, so Team Trump is scrambling to manufacture objectives and concoct victories it can brag about to the public.

But that this effort apparently relies on changing the meaning of established words and phrases speaks volumes about its merits.

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