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After President Trump’s press conference last week, liberal pundits were saying he was “unhinged.” Let’s take Rolling Stone for example, with its headline: 18 WTF Moments From Trump’s Unhinged Press Conference.
Of course it’s not enough to simply express outrage at Trump’s audacity to call out the press for their biased reporting and manufacturing of stories.
They need to prove the 70-year-old commander in chief is clinically nuts — or at the very least, showing signs of dementia.
Aaaaand, what a coincidence! Today an article appeared in the left-leaning UK Guardian about a new study that says “long-winded speech could be early signs of Alzheimers.”
Rambling and long-winded anecdotes could be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease, according to research that suggests subtle changes in speech style occur years before the more serious mental decline takes hold.
The scientists behind the work said it may be possible to detect these changes and predict if someone is at risk more than a decade before meeting the threshold for an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
(A) study, based on White House press conference transcripts, found striking changes in Ronald Reagan’s speech over the course of his presidency, while George HW Bush, who was a similar age when president, showed no such decline.
“Ronald Reagan started to have a decline in the number of unique words with repetitions of statements over time,” said Sherman. “[He] started using more fillers, more empty phrases, like ‘thing’ or ‘something’ or things like ‘basically’ or ‘actually’ or ‘well’.”
Worsening “mental imprecision” was the key, rather than people simply being verbose, however. “Many individuals may be long-winded, that’s not a concern,” said Sherman.
The study also found that dementia is accompanied by characteristic language deficits.
When given an exercise in which they had to join up three words, for instance “pen”, “ink” and “paper”, the healthy volunteers typically joined the three in a simple sentence, while the MCI group gave circuitous accounts of going to the shop and buying a pen.
“They were much less concise in conveying information, the sentences they produced were much longer, they had a hard time staying on point and I guess you could say they were much more roundabout in getting their point across,” said Sherman. “It was a very significant difference.”
Just you wait folks. Reporters are going to start parsing Trump’s speech immediately to find “evidence” of his impending dementia and unfitness to serve.
His tendency to leave the teleprompter to insert an anecdotal story, filler words like “believe me” and “okay” — yep, clearly Trump is on his way to literally losing his mind.
Remember, you read it here first.
[Note: This article was written by Michele Hickford]
