President Trump is targeting the term “woke” — a favorite of his rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Governor DeSantis — setting up a war over a word whose appropriation as a slur or virtue signal has undermined our ability to have dialogue on issues.

Mr. DeSantis peppers “woke” into his speeches the same way as Vice President Gore did “risky scheme.” He used versions of the term — like “woke mind virus” and “woke Olympics” — at least six times in his campaign announcement, and said in his January inaugural, “We reject this woke ideology. We will never surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”

Last summer, Mr. DeSantis even signed the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees — or Stop WOKE — Act. As I wrote in the Sun last month, one weakness of his otherwise excellent speech at Peoria, Illinois, “was the reliance on language lifted straight from right-wing memes.”

Mr. DeSantis’s “references to ‘woke corporations,’” I wrote, “invoked just what the audience wanted them to hear, but it’s lazy rhetoric.” Now, Mr. Trump has come to the same conclusion. “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’ because I hear, ‘Woke, woke, woke,’” he said on Thursday in Iowa.

Targeting an opponent’s rhetoric can throw them off their game, as when President George W. Bush mocked Vice President Gore in 2000 for calling so many of his proposals “risky schemes,” forcing the Democrat to abandon an effective applause line.

“It’s just a term they use,” Mr. Trump said. “Half the people can’t even define it; they don’t know what it is,” but he succumbed to using the word as an insult in a Truth Social post two days later, saying Disney had become “woke” during Mr. DeSantis’s governorship.

Like the slogans “Make America Great Again” and “Hope and Change,” which positioned Mr. Trump and President Obama as agents of delivering whatever a voter thought “great” or “change” might be, “woke” is now subjective shorthand, and when opponents can’t agree on the meaning of words, an honest discussion becomes impossible.

A NBC correspondent, Dasha Burns, asked Mr. DeSantis to define “woke” at a Iowa campaign event on Saturday. The Democratic-Socialist from Vermont, Senator Sanders, faced a similar question in March on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” and proved unable to explain the difference between another political buzzword, “equity,” and “equality,” which it’s meant to mimic.

Mr. DeSantis fared better. “‘Woke,’” he said, is “basically a war on the truth” and “a form of cultural Marxism” — a phrase with its own freighted connotations — that’s “about putting merit and achievement behind identity politics.” The answer provided clarity, but it’s not often that a candidate gets — or wants — that much time to speak.

Attention spans, we’re told, are shorter than ever. Sound bites averaged 43 seconds in the 1968 campaign and fell below nine by 1988. Today, it’s not uncommon for a quote to consist of a single word, and “woke” fits, but the author of “Martha’s Vineyard Basketball: How a Resort League Defied Notions of Race and Class,” Bijan C. Bayne, found the term’s current use absurd.

“People Mr. Trump would’ve never met,” Mr. Bayne told me, “knew what ‘woke’ meant before he did,” saying the “theft of it is a lazy effort to categorize” opponents, the theme of his Washington Post op-ed last year, “How ‘Woke’ Became the Least Woke Word in U.S. English.”

Mr. Bayne wrote “‘woke’ has been mistakenly and purposely misused by everyone from Bill Maher to neo-Nazis,” tracing it to “the deepest trenches of black nationalism,” and therefore, “a white YouTuber or a liberal congressperson cannot, by the literal definition, be woke.”

The idea of “waking up” to oppression was first invoked almost a century ago and, although definitions change over time, “woke” is rare in that its meaning has been whitewashed to mean whatever the listener wishes to infer or the speaker to imply.

“Woke” may never return to its exclusive place in the lexicon of Black nationalism, but by kicking out Mr. DeSantis’s favorite rhetorical crutch, Mr. Trump could help wake the nation up to its original meaning, weakening it as an insult and a boast, allowing more honest discussions to begin.