Reading the transcript of Trump’s interview by the Associated Press, I was struck not only by its incoherence but by the paucity of words that Trump seems to have available to him to discuss any subject. By my count, he used the word “great”
36 times in the interview, always in the context of discussing himself or his achievements. He used “big” or “bigger” or “biggest” a similar number of times, always in the context of his actual or planned accomplishments. In fact, he seemed quite obsessed with the relative size of things: when he appears of a show, it gets its biggest ratings, he’s going to have the biggest tax cut, arrests at the border have seen their biggest drop, etc. There were also multiple uses of “fake news”, “unfairly” and other similar adjectives. I think it is fair to say that my 8 year old grandson has a larger functional vocabulary and a more refined sense of nuance than the President.
This is troubling for if you can’t clearly explain something, you don't understand it. Burying your incomprehension under a snow bank of self-praising adjectives confounds the befuddlement. George W. Bush was occasionally defeated by the English language but compared to Trump, he was Lincoln-esque in his eloquence.
This is not the problem of which George Orwell warned us in “Politics and the English Language”, the deliberate, propagandistic twisting of the meaning of words. It is worse: the semi-literate slop that spews from Trump’s mouth deservedly invites derision and, by so doing, undermines public faith in the ability of democratic institutions to produce leaders equal to the challenges of the 21st. century.