President Donald Trump speaks at the Israel Museum, Tuesday, May 23, 2017, in Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
It was the kind of utterance that makes professional transcribers question their career choice:
“ … there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself — and the Russians, zero.”
When
President Trump offered that response to a question at a press
conference last week, it was the latest example of his tortured syntax,
mid-thought changes of subject, and apparent trouble formulating
complete sentences, let alone a coherent paragraph, in unscripted
speech.
He was not always so linguistically challenged.
STAT
reviewed decades of Trump’s on-air interviews and compared them to
Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking
and unmistakable.
Research
has shown that changes in speaking style can result from cognitive
decline. STAT therefore asked experts in neurolinguistics and cognitive
assessment, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, to compare
Trump’s speech from decades ago to that in 2017; they all agreed there
had been a deterioration, and some said it could reflect changes in the
health of Trump’s brain.
In
interviews Trump gave in the 1980s and 1990s (with Tom Brokaw, David
Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Rose, and others), he spoke
articulately, used sophisticated vocabulary, inserted dependent clauses
into his sentences without losing his train of thought, and strung
together sentences into a polished paragraph, which — and this is no
mean feat — would have scanned just fine in print. This was so even when
reporters asked tough questions about, for instance, his divorce, his
brush with bankruptcy, and why he doesn’t build housing for
working-class Americans.
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