Is there evidence of senility in Trump's speech?

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Sarah Posner on Bluesky, linking to a kamalahq tweet and a kamalahq Instagram post:

In the thread below: a completely rambling, unhinged, incomprehensible quote from Trump at his Flint town hall with Sarah Huckabee Sanders that the Harris campaign distributed, then news headlines about same event.

Where is all the coverage that Trump is old and can't speak a coherent sentence?

I've been defending Donald Trump against similar accusations since my exchange with Geoff Pullum in 2015 — "Trump's aphasia" vs. "Trump's eloquence". Has anything changed?

The answer, I think, is "maybe, but not very much". We'll begin with the 9/17/2024 Flint passage, and then compare the 7/21/2015 passage.

The first point is that the cited passage from the recent Flint town hall  is not "incomprehensible". Here's the prompt from Sarah Huckabee Sanders:

And Mr. President, we don't mind that you give long answers, because you actually have something to say, because you actually got something done when you were president.

And Trump's response (I've edited the kamalahq transcript for accuracy, also including a bit more around the edges, with changes in blue vs. red for the original…):

You know, it's a very interesting- cause she-
she said- I ((could)) said-
I don't think I've ever said this before.
So we do these rallies. They're massive rallies.
Everybody loves everybody stays till the end by the way.
You know,
when she said that,
"well, your rallies people leave"
Honestly, nobody does.
And if I saw them leaving, I'd say "and ladies and gentlemen make America great again" and I'd get the hell out, ok?
Because I don't want people leaving.
But I I do have to ((say)) so
I give these long sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs
But they all come together. I do it a lot. I do it with
uh… raising cane, that story; I do it with the uh
story on the catapults on the aircraft carriers, I do it with a lot of different stories.
When I mentioned Doctor Hannibal Lecter
I'm using that as an example of people that are coming in, from Silence of the Lambs.
I use it, they say
it's terrible.
So they say
so I'll give this long complex area,
for instance that-
I talked about a lot of different territory
the bottom line is I said the most important thing.
We're going to bring more plants into your state, and this country

to make automobiles. We're going to be bigger than before.
But the fake news
says-
There's a lot of them back there, if-
You know, for a town hall, there's a lot of peo
but the fake
news likes to say,
the fake((s)) news likes to say "oh,
he was rambling." No, no, that's not rambling.
That's genius. When you can connect the dots.
((You gotta connect-))
Now,
now,
Sarah,
if you couldn't connect the dots, you got a problem.
But every dot was connected and many stories were told in that little paragraph.
But there is something-
but they say that-

…and onward, through more complaining about not getting credit for his alleged rally sizes and crowd enthusiasm.

Incomprehensible? I don't think so — Trump is clearly complaining about various things that Harris poked fun at during the 9/10/2024 debate.

There are plenty of false starts, parentheticals, and associative jumps. But the focus on reacting to Harris's jibes is consistent and plain.

Compare the 2015 passage that Geoff Pullum reacted to. Here's the audio, followed by the (not very accurate) transcript that Geoff took from Slate magazine:

Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School 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".



14 Comments »

  1. Stephen Goranson said,

    September 20, 2024 @ 9:47 am

    Whether Trump's speech evidences dementia, I'm not qualified to say.
    But his denying that anyone leaves his rallies early does show obliviousness.
    No one there ever thinks:
    Let's beat the traffic. Or, must pick up the kids. Or, regardless of the politician, any other reason to leave.

  2. Laura Morland said,

    September 20, 2024 @ 10:16 am

    Thank you for publishing this cogent analysis.

    Although I abhor almost everything about the current Republican candidate, I have been puzzled by all the "Signs of Dementia!" videos that have popped up in my newsfeed for the past several months.

    Not one that I've viewed has convinced me of real "mental decline" in the man from Mar-a-Lago. He's easily distractible, but he always has been thus. (Read the piece by the "co-author" of _The Art of the Deal_ — he was incapable of giving an in-depth interview, even back then.)

    As an example, I'm a decade younger than he, and while I've never confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, if both of them had been a source of longtime personal irritation to me, I could see it happening in a moment of stress. Anger and exhaustion can cause verbal lapses in almost anyone over the age of 40 (and perhaps even younger).

  3. KeithB said,

    September 20, 2024 @ 10:34 am

    During the debate he did seem to stay on point more, though he still did not answer the questions.

    He is also blurting out random ideas which may be more desperation than senility:
    https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trumps-pitch-credit-card-rates-not-taken-seriously-rcna171989
    -Capping credit card rates to 10%
    -Free IVF
    -Eliminating the Department of the Interior
    -Cutting Car Insurance in half
    -Restoring the full State Tax deduction
    -Somehow using tariffs to pay for childcare (As already highlighted on this blog)

  4. John Baker said,

    September 20, 2024 @ 1:57 pm

    An article in the medical news source Stat, which quotes Mark Liberman but is based primarily on analyses by other academics, does suggest that Trump shows some evidence of cognitive decline, https://web.archive.org/web/20240807235526/https://www.statnews.com/2024/08/07/trump-mental-health-linguistic-analysis-suggests-potential-cognitive-decline-experts-say/. Trump’s pattern of tangentiality is particularly significant. His occasionally mistaking names, though, is a red herring, the kind of thing that could happen to anyone.

  5. Seth said,

    September 20, 2024 @ 1:57 pm

    @KeithB – Trump would hardly be the first politician who, when asked a question, gave a speech of unrelated talking points in response rather than actually answering it. That's generally taken as evidence of contempt for the press, not senility.

    I keep saying, view Trump more like a performer doing standup comedy, and then his style makes much more sense.

  6. Mike Duncan said,

    September 20, 2024 @ 5:19 pm

    I wrote a piece a few years ago that compared one of Trump's rally speeches to Demosthenes's On the Crown, as I thought both had a similar rotary pattern, returning to the same few points again and again in different ways that largely defies any chronological/argumentative analysis… but has a certain populist appeal.

    The main difference: Demosthenes was a lot better at it.

  7. AntC said,

    September 20, 2024 @ 5:51 pm

    @Seth view Trump more like a performer doing standup comedy

    Huh? The Zelenskiy of USA? Please point to some comparable performers.

    Speaking as someone who has paid to see stand-up, I'd both boo and then walk out of such a 'gig'. (And I don't think Trump's many/long warm-up acts are even trying to be comedy. Or is the idea to laugh at them, not with them?)

  8. Seth said,

    September 20, 2024 @ 6:44 pm

    @AntC There's not going to be a one-to-one match, since it's not literally standup comedy. It's *more like* standup comedy. That is, the rhythms, the implicit expectations, the topics – it's all much more akin to a "relatable" performance than a stock political speech, which is usually reading a policy text. Anything I point to, you can just say that's so much more polished and focused, because again, I'm not claiming an exact identity. However, it's a framework which fits.

    Let's take the infamous boats/shark/electrocution story, where a bunch of pundits just lost their minds, and went absolutely nuts over how it must be the ramblings of senile dementia. The things is, if you listen to it as if it were some sort of open-mic story told at a club, it's completely fine. Trump plays a character. This character is a swaggering confident guy who is looking to make a good deal for himself. And the story is basically, "If the boat I'm on, sinks due to bad liberal climate policies (electric vs gas), can I make a better deal for my life with the shark, or the battery?". You make not like the politics, it may not fact-check – but it works on many levels.

  9. Y said,

    September 20, 2024 @ 10:52 pm

    I like "raising cane", though that isn't what was intended by the speaker.

  10. Viseguy said,

    September 21, 2024 @ 12:46 am

    @Seth: I think you've nailed it.

  11. AntC said,

    September 21, 2024 @ 12:55 am

    BTW, the Haitian immigrants thing. Is this a soundalike for 'Asian'?

    Is there a notably large Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio? Are a significant proportion illegal immigrants or there legitimately?

    Claims of Asians eating everything and anything would be more familiar (and has some small basis in fact: the pangolins that brought us Covid, allegedly).

    Was the specific Haitian attribution circulating before Trump gave it wings? Do Americans-in-general/Trump supporters specifically know where Haitians come from?

  12. David Morris said,

    September 21, 2024 @ 3:12 am

    Last weekend, I was distractedly listening to tv news and thought the newsreader said 'Asians' and only on repetition realised it was 'Haitians'.

    People who attend Trump rallies, paying amounts of money and/or travelling distances to do so, are likely to accept every word he says without question.

  13. Jon said,

    September 21, 2024 @ 11:05 am

    The current issue of the London Review of Books has an article about the presidential debate, including, about Trump, "… his rhetorical style is modelled on the Rat Pack's favourite comedian, another Don — Rickles, the king of insults."

  14. Mark Roy said,

    September 21, 2024 @ 6:02 pm

    There was a similar hit piece done on George Bush Sr years ago. He gave a somewhat rambling statement to a reporter, and someone printed it and then did a pedantic
    grammatical dissection of it – and was very pleased with themselves for doing so. All it shows is the lack of character of the writer of the piece.

    So somehow the same people who couldn't recognize that Joe Biden was falling into dementia before the world's eyes suddenly find the same flaws in Trump? I was hoping to be able to vote for DeSantis, but that doesn't rob me of my personal integrity. What is wrong with these people? All of them?

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