Jupp
Dr. Ben Michaelis:
So, I did an analysis for STAT News about seven years ago, looking at the complexity of his speech from when he was in his 40s to when he was running for president back in 2016. And at that time, there was definitely a difference both in his sentence structure and in the complexity of his vocabulary between from when he was, say, in 40s to when he was in his earlier later 60s or earlier 70s.
What's happened between 2016, 2017 and now is not so much a difference in the vocabulary. The vocabulary is not significantly less complex than it was, but it's in the thought patterns. So he's not staying linear. So, right now, we're having a conversation. We're staying on topic. You're asking questions. I'm responding. And what we're saying kind of has a sort of hand-in-glove quality to it.
But what we're seeing with Trump is, basically, he's moving further and further away from linearity, from linearity to tangentiality, so he's sort of weaving together ideas, and then it's moving further afield towards circumstantiality. And that's really where you sort of start talking about a topic, and then you just really sort of lose the thread entirely.
And there's a lot of that we're seeing in his speech patterns.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/trumps-rambling-speeches-raise-questions-about-mental-decline