In words are seen the state of mind and character and disposition of the speaker.

"In words are seen the state of mind and character and disposition of the speaker." - Plutarch


If you are a new reader, I am a Speech-Language Pathologist. I just celebrated my 30th anniversary of professional life! The vast majority of my experience has been with the adult populations with neurological disorders. I work with stroke patients, folks with dementia, Parkinson's disease, brain tumors. I've worked with someone with neurosyphilis. I've worked with myasthenia gravis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease), hypoxic brain injury, gunshot wound to the head, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury. I've worked with folks with unusual conditions that caused cognitive-communication problems, like calcium overdose and  anaphylaxis. You name it, I've probably seen it.

The "pathologist" in my title is not by accident. We are diagnosticians, and because we are so well-versed in neurology and speech, language, and cognition, sometimes we are the first ones to notice symptoms and start the down the path of a diagnosis. I'm a little bit qualified to make judgments on a person's speech and language behaviors.

We have this man in Washington DC with a plethora of well-documented speech and language samples, recorded for us with high-quality audio and video, preserved for eternity, and easily accessed. And as a political and news junkie, you gotta know, I access it!                                                                                                                  

I've written several posts about 45's cognitive-communication and speech symptoms. If you'd like to revisit them, they are under the labels dementia and speech disorders (I've also looked at his speech in the context of speeches and as rhetoric, which is also damaged, or rather damaging).


Time for another look.

45's speech, language, and cognitive symptoms seem to be getting worse. We should be becoming more concerned about it.

Dave Whamond

In the last few weeks there have been:

The Rambling Lie-Fest

In early March, some enjoyed a two-hour rambling speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. You remember that one, don't you? The one where he humped Old Glory? The speech clocked in at over two hours, described as the longest Presidential speech in history, and probably the most incoherent and bizarre.

Would you like to watch it? Didn't think so. But just in case, for history's sake:




Within the two-hour ramble, there were multiple bizarro moments. Here are just a few.

The wack-o put-downs of the Green New Deal, that illustrate his poor grasp of reality:

No planes. No energy. When the wind stops blowing, that is the end of your electric. Let’s hurry up. “Darling, darling, is the wind blowing today? I would like to watch television, darling” ... Their plan would remove every gas-powered car from American roads. Oh, that’s not so bad. They want you to have one car instead of two. And it should be electric. Okay. So tell people, no more cars, no more cars ... It would end air travel. But you’ll get on a train, don’t worry about it. You just have to cross off about 95 percent of the world. And it would force the destruction or renovation of virtually every existing structure in the United States. New York City would have to rip down buildings and rebuild ’em again. I don’t think so. This is the craziest plan. And yet I see senators that are there for 20 years, white hair. See, I don’t have white hair. I don’t have white hair. 

Ok. The end of civilization as we know it. And he doesn't have white hair? Whew! Thank Gawd for that. I really thought we were goners there for a bit.

About the Meuller investigation. If you can make sense of what he's trying to say, you're ahead of me! This just plain doesn't make sense.

Robert Mueller put 13 of the angriest Democrats in the history of our country on the commission. How do you do that? These are angry, angry people. You take a look at them. One of them was involved with the Hillary Clinton foundation, running it. Another one has perhaps the worst reputation of any human being I’ve ever seen. All killers. In fact it would have been actually better for them if they put half and half, and Mueller can do whatever he wants anyway, which he’ll probably. But we have conflicts. I had a nasty business transaction with Robert Mueller a number of years ago. I said, why wasn’t that mentioned? He wanted the job as FBI director. I did not give it to him. Why isn’t that mentioned? Jim Comey, Lyin’ James Comey, is his best friend. James Comey is his best friend. And those are a few of the conflicts. Other than that it’s wonderful.

Still with the election and the inauguration size!  Not pathological language/speech but pathological personality.

How many times did you hear, for months and months, "There is no way to 270"? You know what that means, right? "There is no way to 270." They couldn't get me there. We might as well have just given up. But there wasn't any way to 270.
In fact, I actually went up to Maine to get one, and I did win the one. But we didn't need the one. We didn't need it. We won Maine. We won our half of Maine, remember? You have Nebraska. We won both in Nebraska. We won the half we had to win in Maine. So we got the one, but we didn't need the one, because we didn't get 270; we got 306 to 223. 223-306.

It was raining. And it was wet, and the grass was wet. And women and men, and I consider them totally equal so I’m not going to say it’s harder—in fact it’s probably, with the men I know, it’s actually easier for the women to make the walk. But they had to walk all the way down. They had to walk in high heels in many cases. They had to walk all the way down to the Washington Monument and then back. And I looked and I made a speech, and I said, before I got on, I said to the people that were sitting next to me, “I’ve never seen anything like this. Look at that crowd.” And it was wide! Wide! We had a crowd—I’ve never seen a thing like it. And I have to live—I have to live with “crowd size.” It is all a phony deal, folks. But I saw a picture just the other night of practically no people. It was taken hours before our great day. That was a great day for us. That was a great, great day. People came from all over. People came from all over. So, “Sir, it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares.” I said, “But I care. And people care. People care.”

And the weary, odious claim,

"Right now, we have people in Congress that hate our country. And you know that, and we can name every one of them if we want. They hate our country."

Claiming that his request to Russia for Clinton's email was a joke, saying sarcastically in a bad self-impersonation:

“I’ve learned, because with the fake news, if you tell a joke, if you’re sarcastic, if you’re having fun with the audience. If you say something like ‘Russia, please if you can, get us Hillary Clinton’s emails, please, Russia, please, please get us the emails.’” 

And on. And on. And on.


Some of his discourse is just plain disorganized, "empty," non-sensical. Like his remarks at a different Republican event about Joe Biden:

“We’re going into the war with some socialist. It looks like the only non, sort of, heavy socialist is being taken care of pretty well by the socialists, they got to him, our former vice president. I was going to call him, I don’t know him well, I was going to say ‘Welcome to the world Joe, you having a good time?' ...Now you look at that [presidential announcement] speech and you see what’s happening and that speech was so tame compared to what is happening now, that trek up is one of the great treacherous treks anywhere, and Mexico has now, because they don’t want the border closed.”

In past posts I've portrayed some of his bizarre claims as confabulation. Confabulation is the disordered brain's way of filtering reality through distortions of perception and faulty memory. Confabulations sound like lies. Confabulations aren't reality, but the speaker thinks they are reality, and in true confabulation, there is no intent to deceive. Many times, confabulations are about really small stuff that doesn't matter. But here now, we have the ultimate con man's con man. He's had a lifetime of lying, conning, deceiving. Now his brain is disordered. Lies, confabulation, confusion...It's a recipe for disaster and quite concerning.        


The Saving of a Syllable

A few days after the CPAC speech last month, Dishonest Don had the slip of the tongue when he called Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc, "Tim Apple." He could've just let it slide. Hey, the wrong word came out. It happens to us all. The words "Tim Cook" and "Apple" are real close in his wee brain's file cabinet. He just hastily picked the wrong word.

That wasn't the problem. The problem was, he just couldn't let it go. He dug in. At first, he lied or confabulated that he really said, "Tim Cook Apple" but that he said the "Cook" so fast that it got lost. Sir, do you realize there are 1,000 cameras (with mics!) on you at all times? When that didn't work, he lied or confabulated that he intentionally cut out the "Cook" to save time. That's our SCROTUS!  Always looking to save a little time when he's talking! 

It's just bizarre. It only makes sense if you consider that his brain is impaired. A normal person wouldn't make such claims, especially in the face of video and audio proof, and that this kind of lie just. does. not. matter.


Do you know where your dad was born?

Of course you do! Because you have an intact brain!

Another confabulatory-type false claim came last week when he said his father had been born in Germany. Well, this is simply not true, can easily be verified, and was not a lie that was furthering any agenda. His grandfather, not his father, was born in Germany, and in fact, Donny and his father often intentionally lied that his family came from Sweden rather than Germany in order to further the family business in post-war America. This week's false statement, an autobiographical false statement, is one that is easily verified and doesn't really matter, is a perfect illustration of confabulation.


The Origin of Oranges



This is a puzzling error, and I'm pegging it as a speech error rather than a language error. It really seemed like he was groping a bit for the right sound sequence, and I could see the wheels turning when he erred on the word "origins," then he substituted with the word "beginnings," knowing he didn't say "origins" correctly. But still he tried again and again. Four attempts at "origins" and they all came out sounding like "oranges," though the third one was close to the correct pronunciation. His errors look like apraxic errors to me. Apraxia is a motor programming disorder. He had the word; he sounds of the word were all there, but the order was wrong (the /n/ at the end of the word "origin" came in too early). Apraxia is a neurological disorder.


Not Necessarily Thish Week

I don't have any samples of slurred speech (aka dysarthria, another neurological disorder) this week, but there are plenty of past examples. I outlined some in my post God Bless the United Shashe.


Windmill Cancer

And a couple of really bizarre false statements about wind power. One, that home values near wind turbines plummet 75%, and more bizarrely, "and they say the noise causes cancer.” Oh, the ubiquitous "they" -- those little men that occupy his head. This is not an example of confabulation, but probably more just an outright lie to throw dirt on sustainable energy sources. Any energy source that isn't "beautiful clean coal" or oil from his murderous friends in Saudi Arabia, gets slimed.

Milt Priggee

The Little Things Don't Matter

Another long-term patten of his, which is sort of a lie, or at least an attempt at deception, is that he often mispronounces a word, or mistakes one word for another, but goes on to pretend that he "meant to do that," by saying "or" or "and" in in correction. Why??

Here's is but one compilation from NBC News.




What is he smocking?

I won't even touch on his Twitter misspellings. That's another crazy twist on his tenuous grasp on the English language. Here is an analysis from The Week.

There are many other gaffes, like calling Venezuela a "company" or calling on the "president" of the U.S. Virgin Islands (ahem, that would be you, Mr. SCROTUS. I think you meant "governor"), or calling fire-ravaged Paradise, California, "Pleasure." These kinds of word substitutions (along with "Tim Apple") are semantic paraphasias, where the brain grabs a word similar in meaning to the intended word. Paraphasias are another common neuro-linguistic feature of a brain that is having difficulty with language. Each of these small mistakes should concern us. Normal people don't make so many of them!


The Sum of the Parts

We have a President* who has disorganized discourse, empty at times, incoherent much of the time, with confabulations, intermittent dysarthria, occasional apraxic errors, paraphasias, and whose behaviors are paranoid, apathetic, without inhibition, and inappropriate.

I'm more and more convinced that our President* has some sort of dementia, possibly frontotemporal dementia.

To remind you, dementias have both cognitive-communication traits as well as behavioral traits. Frontotemporal dementia is characterized by:

Behaviors (from the Mayo Clinic)

• Increasingly inappropriate actions
• Loss of empathy and other interpersonal skills
• Lack of judgment and inhibition
• Apathy
• Repetitive compulsive behavior
• A decline in personal hygiene
• Changes in eating habits, predominantly overeating
• Oral exploration and consumption of inedible objects
• Lack of awareness of thinking or behavioral changes

Impaired language traits in frontotemporal dementia typically arise from one of two types of Primary Progressive Aphasia (from the University of California, San Francisco):

• Nonfluent Varient PPA, when the patient has "complaints about pronouncing words or increasing trouble getting words out. Their speech may sound slurred, or their voice may change. As time goes on, people with nfvPPA have more trouble putting sentences together, and they eventually begin to speak slower and slower" or
• Semantic Variant PPA, when patients "have increasing trouble understanding the meaning of words, finding words or naming people and objects. As time goes on, people with svPPA begin to use more general names for specific things. For example, they might say “animal” instead of “dog.” As their word comprehension gets worse, they may eventually have a hard time understanding conversations."

It could be another type of dementia. Another strong contender is multi-infarct dementia (aka vascular dementia). This type of dementia is cause my multiple "mini strokes" all over the brain, most of them unnoticed. I'd put money on this kind of dementia, given the wide variety and the sudden clustering of symptoms that seem to be expressed, for example, his on-and-off dysarthria (slurred speech) and his off-and-on motor symptoms (the way he holds his water; his occasional tics and tremors).

There are many types of dementia, and all can have both behavioral and cognitive-communication components. He needs a neurologist to sort it out.


So, we have a man who is a life-long pathological liar, and now his brain is becoming pathological. As of  March 17, 2019, TRUMP has made 9,170 lies or misleading statements in 787 days. That's an average of almost 12 lies PER DAY of his Presidency, but the rate is accelerating, from 5.9 lies per day the first year of his tenure, to an average of 22 per day in 2019. The Washington Post keeps an on-going tally. You can also see PolitiFact's list.

Pathological liar. Neuropathology. A combination of a compulsive liar / sociopath and a serious neurological decline. Normal people do not act this way. Normal people do not make this quantity of mistakes, nor of this quality, nor do normal people defend or dig in to their errors. This is crazy nuts. He is not fit for the office. This person has access to 4,018 nuclear weapons. It's becoming dangerous!


And so, again, I entreat you. Resist. Call on your Members of Congress. Tell them your concerns. Ask them to do all they can to investigate and remove this person from office. If that doesn't work before next year, then get ready to mobilize for the election of 2020.


Thanks for reading.





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