Language Disorder: ‘Beautiful Flowing Sentences’ All In Trump’s Head (VIDEO)

President-elect Donald Trump has not held a press conference since July.  The man who dominated the airwaves every grueling day of the endless campaign has suddenly fallen silent. Journalists have had to resort to Twitter to find out what the man is thinking.

Trump has been pushed to explain his refusal to speak without a written script. While he’s willing to give speeches to supporters on his “Victory Tour,” he won’t address journalists with probing and important questions.

At a rally in West Allis, Wisconsin, Trump told the crowd that he was tired of having journalists mangle his “beautiful flowing sentences.”

Seriously? Sentences like these?

“If I don’t win, meaning that final stage,  we beat 17 people, it was actually 17 because there’s one that we don’t even talk about, who joined who left very quickly. One statement, he was gone, OK? And then don’t forget, Hillary had a couple of guys that dropped out and then Bernie ran a good campaign…”

VOX asked linguists to weigh in on those “beautiful flowing sentences,” given the fact that Trump is widely known to display evidence of speech problems. Various linguists and this former speech/language pathologist have already written about Trump’s expressive language, calling it both immature and disordered.

The conclusion that the Vox came to is that Trump’s language is based on oral tradition, and is not meant for the sound bite. They conclude that while many find Trump’s unscripted remarks to be incomprehensible, others find them think they’re as clear as day. They don’t address his obvious speech problems.

The difference between reading and hearing Trump, they say, is that when we read his words we see all of the times he jumps off on a tangent, or fails to finish his thought. But when people listen to Trump, they pick up on his chummy tone of voice and his simple catch phrases. (“Lock her up!” comes to mind.) They also fill in the information the he doesn’t provide.

VOX believes that Trump won in part because of his unusual oral language style.

I disagree.

I believe that he won in spite of his obvious speech problems.

As I wrote last July in my analysis of Trump’s spoken language, the man shows all the signs of an expressive language disorder.

Trump is most likely not skipping press conferences because those pesky journalists are mangling his “beautiful” words. He is most likely skipping them because his handlers are afraid to let him out in public for fear of what will come out of his mouth.

The fact that our President-elect is unable to complete a single thought without having it written down first is hugely troubling. When traveling to meet other leaders, there is a tradition of joint press conferences. If Trump’s team doesn’t trust him to speak to the American press, what can we expect with the foreign press?

It is often in private, unscripted conversations where world leaders make key relationships. How can we expect our president to get our position across to the leaders of other countries when he can’t explain to us what he thinks of an upcoming debate?

Will the Cabinet members spend the next four years trying to detangle the knot of Trump’s words so they can understand what he expects from them?

If in fact our President-to-be is one of the millions of Americans with a language disorder, the public deserves to know that fact. If he won’t be able to hold regular press conferences because he can’t answer questions clearly, we certainly need to know that.

And we don’t want to hear that it’s because his language is too “beautiful” and “flowing” for us to grasp.

Watch this video and see if you agree.

 

Featured image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr. Available through CC SA 2.0

 

Karen is a retired elementary school teacher with many years of progressive activism behind her. She is the proud mother of three young adults who were all arrested with Occupy Wall Street. To see what she writes about in her spare time, check out her blog at "Empty Nest, Full Life"