In April, Rachel Leingang at The Guardian suggested that “stories about [Donald Trump’s] speeches often make his ideas appear more cogent than they are.”
Today, STAT News addressed the obvious: Trump loses his train of thought in his speeches.
The topic is little visited by news organizations.* However, Leingang argued that the “vendettas, non sequiturs and comparisons to famous people” that pepper Trump’s speeches demand that some of Trump’s “asides” should be read in full. Like this one, which STAT News also features:
Somebody said [Joe Biden] looks great in a bathing suit, right? And you know, when he was in the sand and he was having a hard time lifting his feet through the sand, because you know sand is heavy, they figured three solid ounces per foot, but sand is a little heavy, and he’s sitting in a bathing suit. Look, at 81, do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant, he was good. I don’t know what happened to movie stars today. We used to have Cary Grant and Clark Gable and all these people. Today we have, I won’t say names, because I don’t need enemies. I don’t need enemies. I got enough enemies. But Cary Grant was, like – Michael Jackson once told me, ‘The most handsome man, Trump, in the world.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Cary Grant.’ Well, we don’t have that any more, but Cary Grant at 81 or 82, going on 100. This guy, he’s 81, going on 100. Cary Grant wouldn’t look too good in a bathing suit, either. And he was pretty good-looking, right? (emphasis added)
Olivia Goldhill at STAT News is making it clear that the changes in Trump’s speech pattern are more than “gibberish” or a “word salad,” two often-used terms that deflect the seriousness of Trump’s linguistic decline.
I was grateful when Goldhill punctured the media balloon about Trump and Joe Biden’s mixing up names. That’s not the issue at hand.
“Everyone to some degree has some level of mixing up of names,” said Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist who has carried out cognitive assessments for the New York Supreme Court. “It’s a bit of a red herring.” Zenzi Griffin, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin agreed, noting the phonetic similarities between “Nikki Haley” and “Nancy Pelosi” (both names start with “N” and both their first and last names end with an “ee” sound.) “That level of similarity really makes it an easy error to make,” she said.
When compared with speeches from 2017, current Trump oratory demonstrates “more short sentences, confused word order, and repetition, alongside extended digressions such as Trump’s comments on Biden and Cary Grant.” There are other asides, like the Biden/Grant story or the boats/batteries/shark digression or the constant references since May to the “late great Hannibal Lecter,” made as though he were a real person.
This shifting from topic to topic, with few connections — a pattern of speech called tangentiality — is one of several disjointed and occasionally incoherent verbal habits that seem to have increased in Trump’s speech in recent years, according to interviews with experts in memory, psychology, and linguistics.
James Pennebaker is a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. After a STAT News request, he analyzed “complete transcripts of 35 Trump interviews from 2015 through this year” using “statistical software to track word use in detail. Although Pennebaker said he’d want to analyze more texts before submitting his findings to an academic journal, he concluded that the texts showed significant changes in Trump’s linguistic tendencies.”
Since the end of Trump’s presidency in 2021, Pennebaker’s analysis showed a steep increase in “all-or-nothing thinking,” as indicated by a roughly 60% increase in use of absolute terms like “always,” “never,” and “completely.” This habit, Pennebaker said, can be a sign of depression, which also fits with other changes in Trump’s word choices: His dialogue now has far fewer positive words than previously, and includes more references to negative emotions, especially since his return to civilian life.
Increased all-or-nothing thinking can also be linked to cognitive ability, and such a sharp increase is associated with cognitive decline, said Pennebaker…
Another clear trend from his analysis showed that, since 2020, Trump has increasingly spoken about the past, with around a 44% increase in past-focused sentences, and is spending very little time talking about the future. This is particularly striking, said Pennebaker, given that presidential candidates are typically forward-looking and making promises about what they will deliver. It’s something that Vice President Kamala Harris picked up on in her first campaign speech, in which she criticized Trump’s vision as being “focused on the past.”
Even as Trump speaks with more derailments, Pennebaker found that he’s relied on unusually simple words and sentence structures since before he was elected president. A linguistic metric of analytic thinking shows that Trump’s levels of complexity have always been unmistakably low, said Pennebaker. Whereas most presidential candidates are in the 60 to 70 range [for complexity], Trump’s speeches range from 10 to 24. “I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” said Pennebaker. “He does not think in a complex way at all (emphasis added).”
STAT News** has done a great public service. Unfortunately, few cable/broadcast news stations or major newspapers are liekly to pick up the story.
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* One often-cited reason news organizations shy away from analysis of any candidate’s psychology or mental acuity is the Goldwater rule. After a story quoted professionals questioning Barry Goldwater’s mental state, the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 stated “[I]t is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”
** STAT is an award-winning speciality publisher focused on medicine and health care.
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The stakes in November have never been more urgent, nor the choices more extreme.
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Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com