CNN airplay shows Trump repeating a 1988 anecdote twice in one hour
A New York Times study cited on air suggests the president now rambles 2.5 times more often and swears triple the rate of 2015.
By Alessia Romano ·
The broadcast cut to a split screen showing the same rally footage played back to back.
In the first clip, the president describes a 1988 television ad featuring Willie Horton. The second clip, taken 30 minutes later, shows him telling the exact same story about the Black man who committed rape and assault after a Massachusetts furlough.
Jake Tapper used the repetition to introduce a new analysis from The New York Times. The study, co-authored by Dylan Freedman, tracked the president's speech patterns from 2015 to the present. Freedman stated that Trump now engages in rambling, digressive passages 2.5 times more frequently than in the past.
The data also indicated a sharp rise in profanity. Tapper highlighted a recent exchange where the president called a journalist "disgusting" and said she looked like "hell." Freedman noted that the president uses swear words almost three times as much as he did a decade ago. Some medical experts cited in the report link that increase to age-related disinhibition.
The analysis relied on AI-assisted methods to measure coherence and vocabulary shifts over the last ten years. The report found that the president's speech has become less coherent and more coarse since he began campaigning for office in 2015.
Tapper concluded the segment by asking how much the president has changed in the last ten years. Freedman answered that listening to recordings from that era reveals a significantly more normal and less coarse speaker. The network aired both versions of the Willie Horton story side by side to illustrate the point.
