"She stopped every single one of them"
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A couple of months ago ("A new Trump speaking style?", 8/10/2024), I gave an example to support my subjective impression that Donald Trump's speech is becoming less fluent. The clip included some cases of word-finding difficulties, as in this characterization of vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz:
She picked a
radical left
uh
man
that is uh
he's got things done that he's-
he has positions that are just not-
it's not even possible to believe
that they exist.
In a more recent 9/28/2024 rally speech, after another spate of re-starts and pauses, Trump produces a phrase that seems to be the opposite of what he means:
Putting it in context:
Earlier this year, while Rachel was out on a run
she was brutally raped and murdered by this
disgusting
illegal alien,
who was let into the United States
by Kamala
and her
lax law. She-
they- they-
every one of my killer-
we had the great-
she would have-
he would have never been able to get in.
She stopped every single one of them.
She was the border czar,
now she doesn't admit that.
In earlier years (see e.g. "Presidential fluency", 10/31/2017), I was struck by the fact that Trump rarely used filled pauses like "uh" and "um", or silent pauses ("dead air"), or rapidly-repeated initial function words like "she- they- they-".
I don't have systematic counts to show that things have changed — maybe later — but I'll register again my subjective impression of a difference.
Philip Taylor said,
September 30, 2024 @ 6:12 am
I try to avoid listening to Donald Trump, but for obvious reasons I listen to my (Vietnamese) wife on a regular basis, and to her (Vietnamese) family less frequently but nonetheless far more often than I listen to DT. And I notice two things — both my wife and her sister (the latter even more markedly) will repeat the same word over and over again while formulating an utterance (her other family members do the same, but perhaps not with the same number of repetitions as she and her sister), and this repetition appears to completely replace fillers such as "er" or "um". And when listening to a member of her family on the telephone, my wife issues a non-stop sequence of "ahs" for as long as her collocutor is speaking.
Mark Liberman said,
September 30, 2024 @ 6:41 am
@Philip Taylor:
Rapid phrase-onset repetitions are common in spontaneous speech — for examples from Mitt Romney and Terry Gross, see "Mitt Romney's rapid phrase-onset repetition" (10/28/2012) and "Dysfluency considered harmful" (5/19/2019).
However, there are large individual differences in the frequency of these interpolations, and my point is that this is one of the aspects of Donald Trump's spontaneous speech patterns that seems to be changing.
Philip Taylor said,
September 30, 2024 @ 7:26 am
All noted, Mark, but the number of repetitions used by my wife's sister, and to a slightly lesser extent by herself, far exceeds those in the examples to which you have linked. I will endeavour to make a (discrete !) recording of one or both speaking spontaneously …
Seth said,
September 30, 2024 @ 12:06 pm
To me, Trump often sounds a lot more physically tired lately – "low energy" at times, to use a certain phrase. I'm not a doctor, though it still doesn't strike me as neurological degeneration. But just speculating, it sometimes seems to me like he's trying and failing not to let on that he's exhausted.
One very positive result for Democrats of the replacement to Harris is that she has much more physical ability to do campaign appearances, both because she's much younger than Biden and has more time to campaign. I think this is putting pressure on Trump to do more campaigning himself, and I wonder if the physical effects of that are showing on him.
Ambarish Sridharanarayanan said,
September 30, 2024 @ 2:49 pm
I read "She stopped every single one of them" to mean she stopped every one of "the great" "killer" entities (presumably enforcement officers" that would presumably have made sure "he would have never been able to get in". In other words, while he was being disfluent, I don't think this is a misnegation.
Mark Liberman said,
September 30, 2024 @ 3:19 pm
@Ambarish SridharanarayananL 'I read "She stopped every single one of them" to mean she stopped every one of "the great" "killer" entities (presumably enforcement officers" that would presumably have made sure "he would have never been able to get in". '
You might be right, maybe that's something like what he meant. But "Every one of my killer…" is a very odd way to describe border guards, and false starts are fine, but it's more than disfluent not to express any complete phrase that states who should have done what.
GeorgeW said,
October 1, 2024 @ 9:04 am
I live in a retirement community and experience a number of people with memory issues and some with early dementia. None of them of them display the type of speech behavior as Trump. But, I don't know what this means. He has clearly become less fluent over time.