He has never been burdened with excessive self-awareness, but even so, some of his recent comments have been jarring. The man who dispenses disparaging nicknames like “Talafreako” for James Talarico and “Annie Trannie” for Dr. Annie Andrews insisted with a straight face the other day that “I don’t go around mocking people.”
Likewise, the commander in chief who recently threatened to “annihilate” Iran complained bitterly that he did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. Even so, one night last month he could not remember the name of the prize he covets. “Does anybody know the name of that peace prize?” he asked in Pendleton, then came up with another: “the Pulitzer Prize.”
When he summoned the name of the Nobel Prize last week in Port Huron, Mich., he declared that he would like to ban all immigrants from Norway, where the award committee is based, because he did not win. “I don’t want anybody from Norway,” he said. “Frankly, Norway sucks. Norway has become a shithouse country, actually.”
These days, even Mr. Trump seems aware that eyes are on him, watching and waiting. “I love the weave,” he told the midterm Republican convention in Dallas in September. “You know what the weave is? You talk about something, then you bring in a ballroom or you bring in an airplane or you bring in Air Force One. But you notice I always get right back to the same topic.”
And yet, he went on, “when someday, there’ll be a time when I do the weave is weave, weave. Someday, there’ll be a time when I don’t get back to the original subject, and then you can say he’s had it. OK? You can say then he’s had it.”
Methodology
The Times collected thousands of Mr. Trump’s speeches, interviews, social media posts and schedules using data from Roll Call’s Factba.se from 2015 through late October this year. To quantify Mr. Trump’s use of all-or-nothing language and swearwords, we measured basic word frequency statistics across Mr. Trump’s presidential terms and campaign periods. To identify confusing and rambling passages of text, we used the A.I. model Claude Opus 5.5 to score more than 6,500 passages of Mr. Trump’s speeches with detailed instructions based on our previous reporting analyzing Mr. Trump’s use of rambling and profane language. We counted a speech passage as incoherent if it scored at least a seven out of 10 with this rubric, which was informed by manual review of hundreds of passages and an evaluation to ensure a high bar of accuracy.