Analyzing Trump’s commencement speech for the USCG Academy

Ajouté : 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Let's talk about Donald Trump's ridiculous speech at the commencement ceremony for the United States Coast Guard Academy. Now, I'm a speech language pathologist and we do something called discourse samples. Sometimes this is what people say auditorially, sometimes this is a written sample, but we take a look at what they have provided. We take a chunk of it and we analyze it from a speech and language pathology perspective. So, we're going to do this today with Donald Trump. Now, I'm not going to have you listen to him.

[00:00:28]It's probably better coming from me, but I am going to read it because it is important that you have the context of what I am analyzing. So, here is a chunk of what he said while he was up there on stage. Think big. During the course of your Coast Guard careers, it will be time for incredible change. And change is going to happen. Change that we can't even think of right now. The things will happen and I believe for the best.

[00:00:54]Hopefully for the best, but I believe for the best. Big things will happen and you can't even imagine and it's going gonna be very exciting. But the way what's that's going to happen is through thinking big. Nothing great was ever built. Think of that. Nothing great was ever built without the word momentum at your side. In times of your life, you'll have momentum. That's the time you go for it. I tell stories about people that lost their momentum and they went and it didn't work out well. You know when you're doing well. You know when you have that positive momentum. So take that momentum and go for it. So many people they wait. They wait the wrong time. You know when it's right. Go with the momentum. The towering men and women of history have always been people of action. You answered the call to serve and now you need to make sure that most of your time is spent on very important roles in life. You've done a lot and you've had a lot of relaxation. Frankly, if you enjoy what you're doing, there's no such thing as work. It's not work what you're doing. I would say with most of you, it's not work. What you've done is a lot of work, but it's not work. It really isn't. It's It's a great pleasure. That's the clip of the speech that I just decided to pick. Just kind of randomly scrolled and there it is.

[00:02:09]Um, on a positive note for Donald Trump, the overall intent is clear, but the delivery is really highly repetitive and it's very loosely organized. So rather than developing ideas hierarchically or analytically, the discourse he uses progresses through reiteration of like emotionally salient concepts, things that are salient to him, Donald Trump, work, big, momentum. Some of the other characteristics that I saw this high lexical repetition, he repeatedly cycles around a small set of what we call semantic anchors. He used momentum, work, think big, and go for it. And that was repeat repeated over and over and again. So instead of using those words and then building on top of them maybe examples of how we think big, maybe an example of momentum or something like that, he just continuously goes back to the same concepts for that entire however long that took for him to say that. So it is this like rhythmic emphasis and it does sometimes reinforce things for an audience but this is an audience audience that did not need that type of reinforcement and we have what we call reduced semantic density. Uh relatively little information was actually said. So in in a nutshell he said a lot of words to not say a whole lot of stuff within this reduced informationational density. We also have that many of the utterances restate prior ideas rather than elaborating or expanding on them. He also has to have frequent reformulation of words that he says or what we call self-repair. So the things will happen hopefully for the best but I believe for the best. It's it's a great pleasure. Those were all examples of things in there. That's actually something called maze behaviors. M A Z. In spontaneous speech, maze behaviors would include things like revisions, restarts, repetitions, or even filler words or self-corrections.

[00:04:09]Donald Trump also demonstrated loose cohesion of abstract reference. So a lot of times he's using very non-specific and vague words. Things will happen it, that, this. there are not a lot of specific reference and that makes the whole meaning a lot less meaningful to the listeners. The listeners at that point then have to infer the meaning figuring it out from what they know of the person, what they know of the situation and that actually puts a lot of work on the listener. Um, and it actually leads to potential for miscommunication because if I say this person and you're thinking that person, all of a sudden we are not on the same page. From a syntax perspective, syntax meaning sentence structure, he has very simple syntactic structure. It's primarily composed of short clauses. He uses coordinations but very simple ones like and, but, or so. um he has repetitive sentence frames. So there's no kind of diversity in the types of sentences that he is using, the type of structure that he is using. I'm looking at it all together and I'm just taking this part of it. We have a speech that's highly repetitive. It has very low information from a density perspective. There's very limited actual information in there. The syntax is very, very simple. And he had to have frequent mazes. um maze behaviors and self-repairs. So, I mean, these people sat and listened to I think the speech was something like 53 minutes long. These poor new grads to the United States Coast Guard. I mean, I don't I don't know who thought that it was a good idea to get Donald Trump up there to give an, you know, an amazing speech about the future. And also, you have to think that this was scripted. Someone gave him a script and this is what comes out. He clearly was not reading off of the script, but somebody apparently prepared something for him to read. He was reading sit sometimes, he was not reading it other times. And we just got this like conglomeration of nothing.

[00:06:19]There was nothing within that speech of any real of any real meaning, of any real motivation. He had to hit on one of the Coast Guard guys. I mean, it just ended up being really, really awkward.

[00:06:30]When I graduated from college, we had the Secretary of the Navy at that point come to the University of Georgia and give our commencement speech. And I can tell you that was a significantly better speech than the one that Donald Trump gave. And you can say that, well, Donald Trump has spoken like this for a long time. Yes and no. It's been a long time because his cognitive decline and brain deterioration has been has been developing over a long period of time.

[00:06:56]But if you go and you look at him during like the debate for 2016, you will not see these features. And I've done videos on that before. Maybe I might do another one again because it can be a good reminder for people like this is not normal, nor is it his normal. It represents some sort of cognitive decline and brain deterioration. And it is these are observable and objective signs that we see in types of dementia.

[00:07:25]We have a president who has some form of cognitive decline and likely dementia and he's got to