In a speech earlier this year, former President Trump was mocking President Biden’s ability to walk through sand when he suddenly switched to talking about the old Hollywood icon Cary Grant.
“Somebody said he [Biden] looks great in a bathing suit, right? When he was in the sand and he was having a hard time lifting his feet through the sand, because you know, sand is heavy. They figure three solid ounces per foot. But sand is a little heavy. And he’s sitting in a bathing suit. Look, at 81, do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant — he was good. I don’t know what happened to movie stars today,” he said at a March rally in Georgia. Trump went on to talk about contemporary actors, Michael Jackson, and border policies before returning to the theme of how Biden looks on the beach.
This shifting from topic to topic, with few connections — a pattern of speech called tangentiality — is one of several disjointed and occasionally incoherent verbal habits that seem to have increased in Trump’s speech in recent years, according to interviews with experts in memory, psychology, and linguistics.
Back in 2017, Trump’s first year in the White House, a STAT analysis showed Trump’s speaking style had deteriorated since the 1980s. Seven years on, now that Trump has the GOP presidential nomination, STAT has repeated the analysis. The experts noted a further reduction in Trump’s linguistic complexity and, while none said they could give a diagnosis without an examination, some said certain shifts in his speaking style are potential indications of cognitive decline.
Both Trump’s and Biden’s cognitive abilities have received extensive public scrutiny in an election initially involving two men of retirement age, though concerns about Biden’s mental competence have faded since he announced he wouldn’t be seeking re-election.
Trump has often said that he’s taken and passed an unspecified cognitive test. Last week, speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists, he said, “I want anybody running for president to take an aptitude test, to take a cognitive test. I think it’s a great idea. And I took two of them, and I aced them.” The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Questions about Trump’s memory are typically raised when he makes a glaring verbal slip, such as mistaking names. Among the most publicized examples in recent months were when the 78-year-old confused former president Obama and Biden, and spoke about Nikki Haley when he meant to refer to Nancy Pelosi. Yet for all the attention they drew, experts in aging and cognition said those errors were relatively insignificant.
“Everyone to some degree has some level of mixing up of names,” said Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist who has carried out cognitive assessments for the New York Supreme Court. “It’s a bit of a red herring.” Zenzi Griffin, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin agreed, noting the phonetic similarities between “Nikki Haley” and “Nancy Pelosi” (both names start with “N” and both their first and last names end with an “ee” sound.) “That level of similarity really makes it an easy error to make,” she said.
Other verbal shifts are more telling. At STAT’s request, four experts reviewed four clips of Trump’s speeches in recent months, and compared them to speeches from 2017. Several noticed Trump’s 2024 speeches included more short sentences, confused word order, and repetition, alongside extended digressions such as Trump’s comments on Biden and Cary Grant, or in another speech, comments on banking abruptly giving way to Trump lamenting the cost of electric cars.
These could be attributed to a variety of possible causes, they said, some benign and others more worrisome. They include mood changes, a desire to appeal to certain audiences, natural aging, or the beginnings of a cognitive condition like Alzheimer’s disease.
One other academic, James Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, performed a more formal analysis for STAT based on complete transcripts of 35 Trump interviews from 2015 through this year. Rather than reviewing specific clips, he used statistical software to track word use in detail, highlighting changes in Trump’s speaking style. Although Pennebaker said he’d want to analyze more texts before submitting his findings to an academic journal, he concluded that the texts showed significant changes in Trump’s linguistic tendencies.
Since the end of Trump’s presidency in 2021, Pennebaker’s analysis showed a steep increase in “all-or-nothing thinking,” as indicated by a roughly 60% increase in use of absolute terms like “always,” “never,” and “completely.” This habit, Pennebaker said, can be a sign of depression, which also fits with other changes in Trump’s word choices: His dialogue now has far fewer positive words than previously, and includes more references to negative emotions, especially since his return to civilian life.
Increased all-or-nothing thinking can also be linked to cognitive ability, and such a sharp increase is associated with cognitive decline, said Pennebaker. “Another person who’s all-or–nothing thinking has gone up is Biden,” he added.
Another clear trend from his analysis showed that, since 2020, Trump has increasingly spoken about the past, with around a 44% increase in past-focused sentences, and is spending very little time talking about the future. This is particularly striking, said Pennebaker, given that presidential candidates are typically forward-looking and making promises about what they will deliver. It’s something that Vice President Kamala Harris picked up on in her first campaign speech, in which she criticized Trump’s vision as being “focused on the past.”
Even as Trump speaks with more derailments, Pennebaker found that he’s relied on unusually simple words and sentence structures since before he was elected president. A linguistic metric of analytic thinking shows that Trump’s levels of complexity have always been unmistakably low, said Pennebaker. Whereas most presidential candidates are in the 60 to 70 range, Trump’s speeches range from 10 to 24. “I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” said Pennebaker. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”
Michaelis, who also reviewed Trump’s speaking style for STAT in 2017 and showed how it had become significantly less sophisticated over the decades, said the most important change in the past seven years is Trump’s increasing digressions and speeches that don’t stay on topic, which he explained can be an indication of diminished cognitive ability. “Tangentiality certainly amped up and it’s difficult to follow him,” Michaelis said. “You’d expect some cognitive diminishment of course, he’s 78 years old — if he was your grandfather you wouldn’t expect anything different. He just happens to be running for president.”
Although Michaelis said he couldn’t offer a formal diagnosis, he said Trump’s speaking style was cause for concern. “There’s reasonable evidence suggestive of forms of dementia,” he said. “The reduction in complexity of sentences and vocabulary does lead you to a certain picture of cognitive diminishment.”
Trump’s habit of speaking off-topic is likely related to the frontal lobe, the part of the brain involved in executive function such as planning and problem-solving, said Andrew Budson, a neurology professor at Boston University and author of “Seven Steps to Managing Your Aging Memory.” This is the area of the brain and aspect of thinking that is most often affected by aging, which makes it difficult to remain focused on one topic, and leads to jumping around in conversation. Such a habit could also reflect ADHD or poor sleep, he said, though it can also be a sign of impending Alzheimer’s.
“There are absolutely changes that are occurring, without any doubt,” he said. Previously, Trump was more focused on topics and could articulately describe events. “Now, it’s much more about evoking different things, using general terms and saying the same thing again and again, then jumping to something else, then jumping back to it,” he added.
This repetitive speaking style could indicate decreased efficiency in the frontal lobe, said Budson, though this could also happen with normal aging rather than a pathological condition. He added that the changes in Trump’s speaking style since 2017 could also reflect a political strategy and desire to connect with a certain audience, or else an increasingly relaxed manner around crowds Trump feels comfortable with.
In addition to shorter sentences, Michaelis noticed Trump using words in the wrong order or inventing words, which adds to confusion in understanding him, and can be signs of cognitive problems that come either with natural aging or conditions such as Alzheimer’s. He pointed to this passage from a campaign event in January:
“We’re also going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you from your political beliefs,” Trump said in the New Hampshire speech. “What they do, they want to debank you. And we are going to debank, think of this. They want to take away your rights. They want to take away your country, the things you’re doing. All electric cars. Give me a break. If you want an electric car, good. But they don’t go far. They’re very expensive.”
“I’m not clear what de-banking means,” said Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who noticed that Trump also seems to be speaking more slowly now than compared to seven years ago.
Determining a definitive cause for Trump’s shifts in language would require in-person tests and interviews, Lieberman said. And analysis is further complicated by Trump’s long-standard unusual communication manner: “You’ve got to keep talking. Never stop. Make up names for your opponent, make fun of your opponent, promise all kinds of things,” said Liberman, who compared Trump’s style to wrestling promo talk.