# Is Trump confused? **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Tags:** trump\ **Created:** [January 24, 2024, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589 "2024-01-24T13:53:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 36
**Author:** ![DesertDog](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/desertdog/32/11503_2.png) [@DesertDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DesertDog)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/701 "2024-05-26T05:03:24Z")
> [@Skywatcher](#): > > That was the conventional wisdom when people were voting for him four years ago. Look how _that_ turned out. And _eight_ years ago. The day after the election I recall thinking, “Well, he doesn’t know much about being President, but then again, who does?” and surely, he’d get competent people – not necessarily ones whose policies I’d agree with – to advise him. right? Boy, was I disappointed. ---
**Author:** ![WOOKINPANUBv.2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wookinpanubv.2/32/3260_2.png) [@WOOKINPANUBv.2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WOOKINPANUBv.2)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 5:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/702 "2024-05-26T05:20:45Z")
I’m of two minds on this (that makes me 1 3/4 minds ahead of Trump). He’s never spoken like a mature, intelligent, serious business man. He’s always talked like someone’s old uncle Moshe, holding court at Thanksgiving. Like he could be funny if he wasn’t so fecking evil and deranged. Some of the examples given here are truly wtf, but a lot of the time I can’t tell if it’s just his usual schtick, because his usual schtick has _always_ been ridiculous. Is he dumbing it down because he’s always addressing such dumbasses? Maybe it will all be clearer at the debate. Will he talk sensibly when it’s one on one with Biden and there’s no drooling idiot audience? ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 8:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/703 "2024-05-26T08:39:36Z")
Missed these ones earlier - “We’re asking this of the Libeterds” [https://x.com/Acyn/status/1794530885800530193](https://x.com/Acyn/status/1794530885800530193) “You’re gonna like me. Firearm. You’re gonna like me. Nobody better than me.” [https://x.com/Acyn/status/1794529995379064936](https://x.com/Acyn/status/1794529995379064936) ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 9:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/704 "2024-05-26T09:23:45Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > “We’re asking this of the Libeterds” He clearly says “Libertarians” ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 10:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/705 "2024-05-26T10:22:09Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > Right, but that habit has significantly worsened is the point I’m making. I guess it is a matter of differing perceptions. Beyond that, it is impossible to know without statistical content analysis, something neither one of us has presented. If anyone ever did want to do it, the raw material is here: > **[Transcripts Home](https://www.rev.com/transcripts)** ---
**Author:** ![Stratocaster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stratocaster/32/16393_2.png) [@Stratocaster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stratocaster)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 10:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/706 "2024-05-26T10:39:44Z")
I agree with those who say there has been a significant, perceptible decline. Trump was always prone to meandering word salads. But his speeches now are littered with gibberish, complete non sequiturs, and moments where he finds it impossible to articulate a thought or effect a transition. I’ve known people in cognitive decline. This is what it looks like. And it only goes in one direction. ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/707 "2024-05-26T12:06:09Z")
> [@Stratocaster](#): > > I’ve known people in cognitive decline. This is what it looks like. And it only goes in one direction. If DJT really has dementia, it will be worse, eight months from now, on inauguration day, and he will not be able to keep track of the follow-up needed to achieve his authoritarian goals. Unless Trump picks an anti-NATO veep such as Tucker Carlson, this would make we much less concerned about him getting a second term. However, I’ve read a few of his 2024 speeches, and they seem to me cognitively normal night-wing authoritarian blather. Time will tell. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 12:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/708 "2024-05-26T12:14:18Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#): > > " _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 so 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, this is horrible_ That’s a good example actually. It’s fairly incoherent and ramblimg, largely false, and has some horrible racist ideas, but I knew straight away it was talking about Iran nuclear deal and associated prisoners. That would have been obvious to anyone at the time when that deal was front page news. That is not the case anymore. Trump’s rants are literally incomprehensible ---
**Author:** ![DETXL](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/detxl/32/19366_2.png) [@DETXL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DETXL)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 12:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/709 "2024-05-26T12:30:21Z")
Without comment on what it might mean, just throwing out numbers, and bearing in mind that: 1. Those transcripts are implicitly going to remove a lot of the gibberish, stammering, mumbling, etc. 2. They’re also implicitly an incomplete sample. 3. The kind of “statistical content analysis” you can do on just the transcripts is also limited and I am not going to listen to hours of Trump’s voice. 4. It also excludes any place where what he says is coherent but incorrect For the rallies from 2019, which is as far back as that site makes things easily available, the average Flesch-Kincaid readability score is 85.2 (6th grade equivalent, with a mode of 6th grade and a high of 9th), the average words per sentence is 12.46, and the average syllables per word is 1.28. For the rallies from 2024, the average Flesch-Kincaid readability score is 90.34 (5th grade equivalent, with a mode of 5th grade and a high of 6th), the average words per sentence is 11.95, and the average syllables per word is 1.22. Apropos of nothing, I will also note he speaks a _lot_ longer these days—one of the 2024 rallies comes in at 20,000 words; another at 18,800. ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/710 "2024-05-26T13:25:51Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > That is not the case anymore. Trump’s rants are literally incomprehensible > [@DETXL](#): > > Without comment on what it might mean, just throwing out numbers, and bearing in mind that: > > 1. Those transcripts are implicitly going to remove a lot of the gibberish, stammering, mumbling, etc. I did wonder about that. However, if Trump’s rants are, pace griffin1977, “literally incomprehensible,” I do not see how [rev.com](http://rev.com) could help. > [@DETXL](#): > > 1. . . . and I am not going to listen to hours of Trump’s voice. You have we beat, because I am not going to listen to even minutes. > [@DETXL](#): > > 1. It also excludes any place where what he says is coherent but incorrect Hmm. I’d think that with dementia, planned lying decreases while [uncalcuated confabulation increases](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/confabulation-dementia#confabulation-in-dementia). > [@DETXL](#): > > For the rallies from 2019, which is as far back as that site makes things easily available, the average Flesch-Kincaid readability score is 85.2 (6th grade equivalent, with a mode of 6th grade and a high of 9th), the average words per sentence is 12.46, and the average syllables per word is 1.28. > > For the rallies from 2024, the average Flesch-Kincaid readability score is 90.34 (5th grade equivalent, with a mode of 5th grade and a high of 6th), the average words per sentence is 11.95, and the average syllables per word is 1.22. Sounds like real information. Is this more consistent with normal aging or dementia? ---
**Author:** ![dasmoocher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@dasmoocher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dasmoocher)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/711 "2024-05-26T13:48:53Z")
> [@PhillyGuy](#): > > Sounds like real information. Is this more consistent with normal aging or dementia? You may find this relevant and related to that: [Tracking Discourse Complexity Preceding Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis: A Case Study Comparing the Press Conferences of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6922000/) > Changes in some lexical features of language have been associated with the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Here we describe a method to extract key features from discourse transcripts, which we evaluated on non-scripted news conferences from President Ronald Reagan, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994, and President George Herbert Walker Bush, who has no known diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Key word counts previously associated with cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease were extracted and regression analyses were conducted. President Reagan showed a significant reduction in the number of unique words over time and a significant increase in conversational fillers and non-specific nouns over time. There was no significant trend in these features for President Bush. > In the present report, we investigate the claims of RR’s cognitive decline through statistical analysis of the transcripts of the President’s press conferences. Presidential press conferences typically consist of two parts: 1) a prepared statement read by the president and 2) a spontaneous question/answer session where members of the media can ask questions. It is often the case that the prepared statements are at least partially written by presidential speechwriters or staff members. As a result, for our analysis we focused only on the latter since the non-scripted nature of the discourse is cognitively more taxing. Someone should compare recent Trump with his past self using this methodology. ---
**Author:** ![DETXL](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/detxl/32/19366_2.png) [@DETXL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DETXL)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/712 "2024-05-26T14:35:25Z")
> [@PhillyGuy](#): > > Sounds like real information. Is this more consistent with normal aging or dementia? I have no idea 😛 I don’t even play a doctor on TV, I’m just some easily distracted weirdo. Naively, I do not think the transcripts on that website evidence a _significant_ decline, although again that’s confounded if you suppose that Trump says nonsense that outwardly appears to be normal English, like ChatGPT does. That said, if you told me there was a _change_, I don’t think I would argue. It did occur to me there is at least one other bit of data to be extracted from the transcripts. The 2019 sample comprises 151,000 total and 6,402 distinct words. The 2024 sample comprises 163,000 total and 5,949 distinct words. So Trump is, at least, quantifiably speaking with a reduced vocabulary these days. An alternative explanation to all of this of course, is that Trump is honing his message towards his base, and his base _happens to like_ shorter, punchier sentences. Or it could be that all political speeches are just like that. Pulling what that site has from Joe Biden, he’s used 6,636 distinct words across ~110,000 words of speeches, but the Flesch-Kincaid score is still about 7th grade (average sentence length: 15.82 words). (edit: irrelevant aside, but in 2024, Trump’s 126th most common word was “Trump,” beating out “America” in 139th place and making up 0.14% of his speech. For Joe Biden, “America” is the 39th most common word, representing 0.4% of his speech. Biden said “Biden” 18 times, 0.017%) ---
**Author:** ![enipla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/54ee81/32.png) [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/713 "2024-05-26T15:58:34Z")
Really folks. He’s not confused. He’s a moron. Most moron’s, however, given $600,000,000 would be set. Might even do some good with that. But Trump is an evil moron. He must hurt others to feel good about his own miserable existance. ---
**Author:** ![Stratocaster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stratocaster/32/16393_2.png) [@Stratocaster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stratocaster)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/714 "2024-05-26T16:15:37Z")
> [@enipla](#): > > He’s not confused. He’s a moron. He was always a moron. He’s afflicted with dementia now. They’re not mutually exclusive. ---
**Author:** ![duality72](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/duality72/32/3910_2.png) [@duality72](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/duality72)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/715 "2024-05-26T18:49:11Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#): > > > [@Smapti](#): > > > > “We’re asking this of the Libeterds” > > He clearly says “Libertarians” I wouldn’t say clearly. At best, he says “libeterians”, but his enunciation falls off so badly toward the end of the word that sometimes I do hear “libeterds”. It’s like a word audio illusion. ---
**Author:** ![DesertDog](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/desertdog/32/11503_2.png) [@DesertDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DesertDog)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/716 "2024-05-26T19:25:38Z")
> [@Stratocaster](#): > > He was always a moron. He’s not a moron in the real sense. He is average intelligence\* with a healthy helping of sociopathy that makes him look stupid. \*“Half the people are dumber than _that_.” ---
**Author:** ![duality72](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/duality72/32/3910_2.png) [@duality72](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/duality72)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/717 "2024-05-26T21:13:43Z")
> [@duality72](#): > > It’s like a word audio illusion. Er, that was supposed to be “weird audio illusion”. ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/718 "2024-05-26T21:26:22Z")
> [@duality72](#): > > Er, that was supposed to be “weird audio illusion”. Reads cromulent nonetheless. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/719 "2024-05-26T22:49:07Z")
Is this something you do because you’re in a mental decline, or because you’re still shaken up from getting embarrassed at the Libertarian convention yesterday? [https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1794857683629244631?t=jzTrD6WYJv4VOb2WLMUffA&s=19](https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1794857683629244631?t=jzTrD6WYJv4VOb2WLMUffA&s=19) Or is it common to salute to the song ‘Amazing Grace’? ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2024, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589/720 "2024-05-26T23:10:25Z")
> [@PhillyGuy](#): > > I did wonder about that. However, if Trump’s rants are, pace griffin1977, “literally incomprehensible,” I do not see how [rev.com](http://rev.com) could help. So it’s definitely always been the case that the mainstream media has made small corrections to Trump speeches making him seem more coherent than he is (it’s always bugged me and it’s one ofthe ways the mainstream media enabled and normalized Trump). But 2024 Trump goes way behind the kind of thing that can corrected by adding or correcting the odd word here and there. See some of the examples in this thread, he is clearly having a mental decline: [https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/diminished-and-confused-trump-delivers-low-energy-incoherent-speech-in-nashville/ar-BB1iKyp0](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/diminished-and-confused-trump-delivers-low-energy-incoherent-speech-in-nashville/ar-BB1iKyp0) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589.md?page=35) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-trump-confused/996589.md?page=37)