It is unbelievable, isn’t it? Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has just ordered his staffers to stop using the Calibri font in diplomatic correspondence and to use Times New Roman instead.
The Biden administration adopted Calibri in 2023 on the recommendation of the then-Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken: people with visual disabilities would find it easier to read the Calibri font, which does not have serifs (“sans” serifs), on screens and other assistive technologies. Serifs are the curly bits, the tails and wings, on letters – the kind that Times New Roman uses.
“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility] program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface,” Rubio told staff in US embassies and consulates in a memo.
He slammed home the point. Associated Press quotes him:
“Although switching to Calibri was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of DEI it was nonetheless cosmetic.”
“Inclusion”, a sworn enemy
But the shift to the Calibri font, or typeface, was never about cosmetics. It was about accessibility and inclusion. Molly Eagan, the CEO of the nonprofit, VISIONS, told ABC News:
“Calibri and other sans-serif fonts are widely recommended because they are easier to read for people with visual impairments … we see every day how simple choices – like font, spacing, contrast, and layout – directly affect whether information is truly usable.”
Even more, this smells of war. Inclusion is a sworn enemy of the current powers. Trump declared war on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) when he took office – and this latest move signals that his chosen few will stop at nothing to root out DEI everywhere, even in something as seemingly minor as fonts.
The not-so-subtle messages
Indeed, the field of fonts becomes the battleground. Manipulating them is a cheap and administratively easy way to grab a few headlines and show the Trump base that his people are “reversing Biden” and “fighting wokeness”.
The move equates the authoritarian right-wing with “decorum and professionalism” and being more legitimate – and the “woke” with being “illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful”, a stain to be scrubbed away.
This kind of language builds a sense of identity among supporters. It places those who don’t agree with authoritarians or are of a different race or gender persuasion into a box labelled “enemy”.
A page from the Nazi playbook
Naturally, this is not the first time fonts have been on the frontline. As with many other aspects of the current administration, we need look no further than Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
In 1941, the Nazis banned the traditional Gothic blackletter font, Fraktur – claiming that it was “Jewish” in origin – and ordered a switch to Roman Antiqua scripts in official documents, newspapers like Völkischer Beobachter and books like Mein Kampf reprints. Initially, the Nazis strongly preferred the heavy, dense Fraktur, declaring it the typeface of the party – it’s a recognizable stamp on early Nazi materials and even appears in neo-Nazi comms today. The Roman-style Antigua, meanwhile, was dismissed as shallow, trivial and un-German.
There is some speculation about what exactly led to the Nazi adoption of Antigua as the standard. This explanation makes sense to me:
“Hitler knew that if he wanted to rule over the world, he would have to use a typeface that the rest of the world could actually read, so he chose Roman.”
Typography matters
Hitler and other racist right-wingers understand that typography matters. It’s an important cog in a big machine of “othering” anyone different and consolidating their base. Hate speech is also a cog – to wit, Trump’s labelling Somali immigrants as “garbage”.
Rubio’s font order is not unbelievable at all. It is horrifyingly real.
