In the run-up to last week’s midterm tsunami, I became perplexed by the way President Trump was talking. And because he is the same person now as he was then — and perhaps even “samer,” as he might say — I remain perplexed.
The issue is not that Trump often seems barely able to rub a noun and a verb together. I’ve generally felt that his barstool speaking style is partly a function of America’s increasingly informal approach to oratory, and partly because Trump realizes that his cult of personality eliminates the need to eloquently project authority.
And as I wrote recently, his increasing use of profanity is due to the fact that novelty wears off and you have to always set the flame higher. Oreos now come not only in a Double Stuf variety — what a Dionysian blast that was for a kid when they were introduced in the 1970s — but now an even more padded Mega-Stuf. Mega-Stuf Trumpianese, including his recent forays into seemingly homoerotic asides, gets the audience going.
I’ve watched many Trump speeches over the years. But in his recent rallies, I saw something new.
Last month in South Carolina, Trump referred to the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley as “the governor EEHHP.” It was a bizarre belch-like noise, something uncontrolled. Was Trump going for a dis of Haley? If so, it was an oddly clumsy one for a master of the stand-up put-down. “Governor EEHHP”?
The next day, discussing the Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed, Trump said, “If you don’t want communists controlling the U.S. Senate which is between JAYYT … how about the gentleman from a place called Michigan?” The “JAYYT” has no meaning, and why “a place called Michigan,” as if Trump were referring to Brigadoon? Did it help him save face for a verbal glitch?
So: “EEHHP,” “JAYYT” — and then “jigger.” That one was in Mississippi, and it was Trump referring to gas prices in Iowa being $1.85 “on the top of the jigger.” What’s a jigger? (A measuring tool for bartenders, sure — but what does that have to do with gas?)
It went on. There were times when Trump was clearly grasping for basic concepts, and erring even in his attempts at correction. “They gave the wonderful peace prize, right? Does anybody know the name of that peace prize?” Trump asked. But why be coy about the name of a prize that’s as renowned as the Oscars? It’s reasonable to wonder whether he was blanking on the name of the Nobel Peace Prize — especially since he went on to refer to it as the Pulitzer. “They gave the Pulitzer Prize to a young lady …”
Now, we have to distinguish the genuinely unusual from what linguists know as ordinary speech errors. When Trump says we must be aggressive with anyone “who kills a police officer, or a law po … a l … … any officer on law enforcement,” that’s just sloppy speech, of a kind few of us are immune from.
It’s the same with him saying “colleges and universities will purge the antisemitism and pro-terratist … terra … and what you’re doing.” Trump has long been comfortable with blurps like this.
A neighbor and I were talking about a fellow neighbor’s dog who had undergone surgery, and she said casually, “Well, they gave him open-cavity … open … well, they went into him!” She meant “open-heart,” but spontaneously threw in “cavity” because one thinks of that as what surgery is. She was a perfectly articulate person.
Casual speech is less tidy than written language. We speak in little ventures of about seven to 10 words, flecked with vaguenesses and false starts.
But Trump talks in ways that can sound odd even to a linguist.
For example, he recently spoke of “building a 3.2 billion dollar shipyardcree.” It’s fun to giggle, “What’s a shipyardcree?” But Trump followed it up with “you’re gonna create 10 thousand jobs right here.” So the “cree” on “shipyard” was Trump anticipating that he was about to say “create.” That’s what linguists call “anticipation error.” For “reading list,” you might sense the “l” on “list” ahead and say “leading list.” For “free throw” you might, for the same reason, say “three throw.”
But really, Trump’s “shipyardcree” was still odd. He just says “shipyardcree” as a single word in itself, and then pauses, as if the “cre-” of “create” just jumped randomly backward from what he was about to say and glommed onto the word before it. This isn’t normal anticipation error. It sounds, even to a linguist, garbled, rando, broken.
Trump plows through these odd eruptions and stark incoherencies as if they were par for the course. If President Joe Biden had popped off with even one example of what is now verbally typical of Trump, MAGA enthusiasts would have classified it as indisputably dire. One assumes they will not do the same with Trump.
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