He added later that he “ran for president one time and won!”
I’m not sure why anyone ever thought Trump’s puerile nicknames were so clever to begin with but to the extent he has a real “nickname” talent, he’s certainly lost it now:
The former president, who rarely mentioned Harris until after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, tried out “Laffin’ Kamala” before pivoting to “Lyin’ Kamala,” then jettisoned that for “Crazy Kamala,” which he interspersed with misspellings of her name.
In the last few days, he has abandoned those monikers — even as he continues to use nicknames for other adversaries.
Demeaning nicknames have been core to Trump’s political brand since he first jumped into the political scene, a tool he has leveraged against both Republicans and Democrats to humiliate his opponents and rile up his supporters. But he’s struggled to adjust to run against Harris, even as he has leaned into personal attacks.
He’s been repurposing his insults from the very beginning. He re-used “crooked”, “lyin'” “li’l” and “crazy” several times and added some truly bizarre ones like “Coco” and “Peekaboo” which only left people scratching their heads. He apparently doesn’t know what a thesaurus is so he’s just stuck with a handful of words that he can’t seem to fit with “Kamala.”
This shouldn’t be surprising. He has the vocabulary of a 4th grader. I’m not kidding:
President Donald Trump—who boasted over the weekend that his success in life was a result of “being, like, really smart”—communicates at the lowest grade level of the last 15 presidents, according to a new analysis of the speech patterns of presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.
The analysis assessed the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and more than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels. Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry Truman, who spoke at nearly a sixth-grade level.
At the top of the list were Hoover and Jimmy Carter, who were basically at an 11th-grade level, and President Barack Obama, in third place with a high ninth-grade level of communicating with the American people.
The Flesch-Kincaid scale was developed in 1975 for the U.S. Navy to assess the relative difficulty of training manuals. A database of Trump’s words, compiled by the incomparable factba.se, ran the comparative analysis yesterday, in response to the president’s claim that he is “a genius.”
Factba.se has collected interviews, speeches and press conferences from previous presidents, using material publicly available from presidential libraries, and including the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, which contains presidential press conferences going back to Hoover in 1929.
The website excluded communiques issued by the last two presidents on social media and limited the study to unscripted words uttered at press conferences and other public appearances.
The words were run through a variety of lexicological analyses, besides the Flesch-Kincaid, and the results were the same. In every one, Trump came in dead last. Trump also uses the fewest “unique words” (2,605) of any president—Obama was the best at 4,869—and uses words with the fewest average syllables, with 1.33 per word, compared to positively multi-syllabic president Hoover at 1.57.
“By every metric and methodology tested, Donald Trump’s vocabulary and grammatical structure is significantly more simple, and less diverse, than any President since Herbert Hoover, when measuring “off-script” words, that is, words far less likely to have been written in advance for the speaker,” Factba.se CEO Bill Frischling wrote. “The gap between Trump and the next closest president … is larger than any other gap using Flesch-Kincaid. Statistically speaking, there is a significant gap.”
Remember:
Trump’s National Economic Council chief Gary Cohn allegedly wrote in an email that the White House was in chaos. “It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns,” Cohn wrote. “Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better.”
