Remember when Trump made fun of conservatives for saying woke?

Donald Trump loves to rant about nonsensical things when he is standing in front of a crowd. But one of his most recently riveting speeches revealed something most Americans already knew. Namely, that conservatives had no idea what the word 'woke' meant.

During a June 2023 campaign event in Iowa, the former president criticized conservatives for using the word woke and explained most of them couldn’t even define the term's meaning. 

“The country’s gone sick, it’s gone sick,” Trump explained on stage after ranting about parental choice and children being allowed to choose their own gender in American schools. 

“I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘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 added. 

The former president went on to ramble about transgenderism in sports according to a report from Rolling Stone, in what appeared the unhinged rant of an elderly grandparent mad about the changing world around them before giving a very odd example of woke. 

Trump explained that he was not a fan of Lebron James but if he were the coach of a Women’s National Basketball League team he would have the greatest team because he would ask Lebron if he’d like to become a woman, implying he would join his team. 

Trump also said he’d ask another four or five big guys and tell them that they would be undefeated for many many years and that there would never be anything like it. “I’ll go down as the greatest in history, they'll say, I was the greatest ever, " Trump said. 

“And that’s all woke, you know that’s all, I guess they define that as woke. But that’s all woke,” the former president added in an explanation that clearly showed he was among the many conservatives that didn’t actually understand what the term woke meant. 

“Uh, we have to bring common sense back into the country,” Trump explained, “Oh you know people say you’re conservative. I said yeah I’m conservative but more important is I’m a person with common sense…” clearly he also doesn’t know what common sense means either. 

While many might have found Trump’s rant on the definition of woke absurdly funny, it did reveal the very real and effective tool the word had become for the American right as a means to categorize everything they disagreed with in society according to Newsweek. 

The boycotts of Bud Light and Target over perceived woke slights at the time showed that sensitivity around things perceived as being woke could sway a vast majority of people in the country into adopting a cause, and such a scenario might have been why the former president took aim at the word woke. 

Woke identity politics also formed a key pillar of Florida Governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis' campaign to unseat Trump as the undisputed leader of the Republican party. 

DeSantis was Trump's main competitor in June, which is why it made sense for the former president to start undercutting DeSantis' key policy platform. 

“The woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism. At the end of the day, it's an attack on the truth. And because it's a war on truth, I think we have no choice but to wage a war on woke," DeSantis said on Fox News Tonight after his presidential campaign launch.

DeSantis’ interview laid out just how much he was relying on his reputation as an anti-woke warrior to carry him to the Republican nomination. 

It was no wonder then, why Trump started pushing back against the term woke. However, the American political right's war on woke hasn't died off quite yet. Fighting the 'lefts' woke agenda seems to be as popular as ever.