Experts: Trump’s Speaking Style “Raises Questions About His Brain Health”
Those sentence fragments and crimes against syntax are also bigly causes for concern.
John Montgomery, a psychologist in New York City and adjunct professor at New York University, said “it’s hard to say definitively without rigorous testing” of Trump’s speaking patterns, “but I think it’s pretty safe to say that Trump has had significant cognitive decline over the years.”
No one observing Trump from afar, though, can tell whether that’s “an indication of dementia, of normal cognitive decline that many people experience as they age, or whether it’s due to other factors” such as stress and emotional upheaval, said Montgomery.
.. There’s also the possibility that Trump has changed his speaking style in an effort to appeal to his base. “He may be using it as a strategy to appeal to certain types of people,” said Ben Michaelis, a New York-based psychologist. But as STAT reporter Sharon Begley points out, Trump’s changes in speech began before he was attempting to appeal to a certain demographic outside of New York City, and have been apparent even when he’s spoken to what he likely assumed was an audience of “East Coast liberals.”
. . . Linguistic decline is also obvious in two interviews with David Letterman, in 1988 and 2013, presumably with much the same kind of audience. In the first, Trump threw around words such as “aesthetically” and “precarious,” and used long, complex sentences. In the second, he used simpler speech patterns, few polysyllabic words, and noticeably more fillers such as “uh” and “I mean.”