Trump has a very small vocabulary for a supposedly educated person and speaks at a 4th grade level according to experts. There’s nothing new in that. And repeating himself is part of his strategy to convince people his lies are the truth. The sheer audacity of lying constantly even in the face of absolute proof seems to be seen by many people as proof that you’re not lying. (I can’t understand it either…)
His “cognitive tests” (which he says he “aced” like nobody’s ever aced them before) notwithstanding, he is getting worse. He can’t seem to keep a single train of thought and that’s actually new. He’s calling this rambling “the weave” and says his English professor friends call it brilliant. (He has no English professor friends.)
Psychiatrist Richard Friedman in the Atlantic says it’s concerning:
The speech Trump excuses as the “weave” is one of many tics that are starting to look less strategic and more uncontrollable. Last week, David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic that the former president has a penchant for describing objects and events as being “like nobody has ever seen before.” At the debate, true to form, Trump repeatedly fell back on the superlative. Of the economy under his presidency: “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.” Of inflation under the Biden administration: “I’ve never seen a worse period of time.” Of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan: “That was one of the most incompetently handled situations anybody has ever seen.” Harris, for her part, also showed some verbal tics and leaned on tired formulations. For instance, she invited viewers more than 15 times to “understand” things. But Trump’s turns of phrase are so disjointed, so unusual, and so frequently uttered that they’re difficult to pass off as normal speech.
Trump’s speech during the debate was repetitive not only in form but also in content. Politicians regularly return during debates to their strongest topics—that’s just good strategy. Harris twice mentioned Project 2025, which voters widely disapproved of in recent polling, and insisted three times that Americans want to “move forward” or “chart a new way forward.” Trump likewise expounded at every opportunity on immigration, a weak issue for Harris. But plenty of the former president’s repetitions seemed compulsive, not strategic. After praising the Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, Trump spoke unprompted, at length, and without clarity about gas pipelines in the United States and Europe, an issue unlikely to connect with many voters. A few minutes later, he brought up the pipelines again. The moderators cut him off for a commercial break. Even in cases where Trump could have reasonably defended himself, he was unable to articulate basic exculpatory evidence. When Harris raised his infamous “very fine people on both sides” remark regarding the 2017 white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump could have pointed out that even at the time, he had specified, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists—because they should be condemned totally.” But he did not.
In psychiatry, the tendency to conspicuously and rigidly repeat a thought beyond the point of relevance, called “perseverance,” is known to be correlated with a variety of clinical disorders, including those involving a loss of cognitive reserve. People tend to stick to familiar topics over and over when they experience an impairment in cognitive functioning—for instance, in short-term memory. Short-term memory is essentially your mental sketch pad: how many different thoughts you can juggle in your mind, keep track of, and use at the same time. Given the complexity of being president, short-term memory is a vital skill.
He says that if he had a patient with the “verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech” that Trump shows, he would definitely refer him for a thorough neuropsychiatric evaluation. Also, those characteristics make him completely unqualified to be president of the United States.
I’m not a psychiatrist but would just add that he’s also a puerile, self-centered asshole who only cares about himself which is also disqualifying.