Reason # 54: Word Salad
Why do we need to defeat Donald Trump and ensure that a Democrat occupies the White House?
As we were watching the September 10, Harris vs. Trump debate, two psychiatrists used the term “word salad” to describe what they were hearing from Donald Trump. I was unfamiliar with the term and looked it up. Wikipedia describes word salad as follows.
A word salad is a “confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases”,[1] most often used to describe a symptom of neurological or mental disorder. The name schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia.[2] The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but they are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them.
An associated term is “Logorrhea, a mental condition characterized by excessive talking (incoherent and compulsive)”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad
A recent article in the San Fransisco Chronicle argues that media journalism has done a major disservice by cleaning up the transcripts of Trump orations in order to make them more syntactical and thus more readily understood by readers. This process of editing tends to ignore the profound disturbance of speech illustrated in the verbatim transcripts of his speech. Consider the following example.
“She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s — and I own a big building there — it’s no — I shouldn’t talk about this but that’s OK I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world — sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”
Are you able to extract any coherent meaning from this long, convoluted screed? I certainly cannot.
How about this selection from the speech that incited the crowd to invade the U.S. Capitol.
“You know they wanted to get rid of the Jefferson Memorial. Either take it down or just put somebody else in there. I don’t think that’s going to happen. It damn well better not. Although, with this administration, if this happens, it could happen. You’ll see some really bad things happen.
They’ll knock out Lincoln too, by the way. They’ve been taking his statue down. But then we signed a little law. You hurt our monuments, you hurt our heroes, you go to jail for 10 years, and everything stopped. You notice that? It stopped. It all stopped.”
Is this coherent speech or the ravings of a mentally disturbed man?
Now try this one.
“They want you to say what they want you, what they want to have you say. And we’re not gonna let that happen. You’re going to say as you want and you’re going to believe, and you’re going to believe in God. You’re gonna believe in God because God is here and God is watching.’
This sounds like something you might expect to hear from some poor soul who lives on the sidewalk and wears an aluminum foil hat to protect himself from UFO microwaves.
And what about this beauty?
‘Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, okay, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right — who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.’
https://www.vox.com/2016/8/18/12423688/donald-trump-speech-style-explained-by-linguists
This would be hilarious, except that the speaker could be responsible for negotiating nuclear armament control policies with Iran and might have his finger on the (figurative) red button that launches our nuclear arsenal!
“They want you to say what they want you, what they want to have you say. And we’re not gonna let that happen. You’re going to say as you want and you’re going to believe, and you’re going to believe in God. You’re gonna believe in God because God is here and God is watching.’
Of course, we have only scratched the surface of this lunacy here. If you seek further examples, there is a wonderful web site that offers full transcripts of Donald Trump speeches.
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcript-category/donald-trump-transcripts
Have a heart; use your mind, search your conscience, and vote for Democratic candidates – across the ballot – on November. 5th.
I do not have the experience or credentials to determine whether this profoundly disturbed pattern of speech represents a symptom of schizophrenia or dementia, but it is profoundly worrisome and it certainly is not safe to vote for someone whose cognition is this deeply impaired.
Please share this message with your friends and please, add your thoughts, to expand upon what are only brief sketches here.
Fred Grannis
September 11, 2024