The US Government Declares War on a Typeface

 

Three days ago (12/9/2025), Secretary of State Marco Rubio banned the use of Calibri across all State Department communications, declaring the font “woke”

Before we get to the theatrics, let’s start with the boring, human part: the U.S. government originally shifted from Times New Roman to Calibri in 2023 because it was easier to read. Full stop. Better for people with dyslexia. Better for low-vision readers. Better for screen readers.

It was about access, not aesthetics.

But in the age of symbolic governance, even readability can’t escape the culture-war centrifuge. And so here we are, watching a Secretary of State dust off Times New Roman like it’s some ancient relic of civic virtue and not a perfectly fine typeface retired for perfectly practical reasons.

This is the new political circus: turn a typography choice into a tribal marker, frame accessibility as ideology, and cast Calibri as the villain skulking in the margins of American decline. A font, suddenly “informal,” “wasteful,” or somehow spiritually suspect … depending on which side of the outrage machine you’re standing near when it starts to smoke.

This is governance as stagecraft. The performance of decisiveness instead of the practice of it. Swap nuance for noise, and voilà: instant headline. A victory you can claim without solving a single real problem.

But the people who actually need accessible typography? They’re not on the playbill. They don’t get a spotlight. They’re collateral to the bit.

Because this was never about fonts. It’s about the irresistible lure of symbolic skirmishes ,,, easy battles fought for the cameras while the hard ones wait, gathering dust like an unused policy binder.

A country can survive a bad typeface. What’s harder is surviving leadership that confuses the theater for the mission, that mistakes the show for the work, that fights the font instead of fixing the world the font was meant to help people understand.

And that’s the part we should all read in bold.