Donald Trump has been losing his train of thought more frequently during speeches and other remarks, and cognitive experts suspect something's wrong.
Both the former president and current president Joe Biden have undergone public scrutiny over their mental fitness, to the point where Biden ended his re-election campaign, and STAT conducted a follow-up analysis to a 2017 examination of Trump's speaking style and found even further reduction in his linguistic complexity.
"At STAT’s request, four experts reviewed four clips of Trump’s speeches in recent months, and compared them to speeches from 2017," the publication reported. "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."
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"These could be attributed to a variety of possible causes, they said, some benign and others more worrisome," the report added. "They include mood changes, a desire to appeal to certain audiences, natural aging, or the beginnings of a cognitive condition like Alzheimer’s disease."
Social psychologist James Pennebaker, of the University of Texas at Austin, performed a more formal analysis based on complete transcripts of Trump interviews since 2015 using statistical software to track word use in detail to highlight changes in his speaking style, and while he wasn't prepared to submit his findings to an academic journal, he noticed a significant difference.
"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 percent increase in use of absolute terms like 'always,' 'never,' and 'completely,'" STAT reported. "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 reveal changes in cognitive ability, and Pennebaker said sharp increases like he saw in Trump are often associated with cognitive decline.
“Another person who’s all-or-nothing thinking has gone up is Biden,” Pennebaker added.
Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist who has carried out cognitive assessments for the New York Supreme Court, previously reviewed Trump's speaking style seven years ago and found he lost his train of thought and digressed from topics more frequently, which can reveal diminished cognitive ability.
“There’s reasonable evidence suggestive of forms of dementia,” Michaelis said. “The reduction in complexity of sentences and vocabulary does lead you to a certain picture of cognitive diminishment.”
