ool of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it's not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it's gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
My response:
Geoff Pullum uses terms like "aphasia", and phrases like "I don't think there's any structure in there", in describing a quoted passage from Donald Trump's 7/21/2015 speech in Sun City SC. But in my opinion, he's been misled by a notorious problem: the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form.
This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form, the cues are gone, and we lose the thread.
Has anything changed?
Certainly not the false starts and parentheticals, and also not the repetitions and the associative jumps in topic. And there's even consistency in the focus on how others don't give him the credit that he deserves. I have the impression that a detailed analysis of his various rhetorical irregularities might show a quantitative increase in some dimensions — but I haven't done that yet, and neither has anyone else.
Donald Trump's rhetorical style is certainly different from most other contemporary American politicians. And there are plenty of plausible comparisons to alcoholic speech (though Trump is a teetotaler) and to the effects of various neuropsychological disorders, including some of those associated with aging. But his style is clearly effective in reaching an audience, and there's no clear evidence of any recent changes.
For (a list of far too many) more posts on related topics, see "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric".
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