Trump wasn’t always so linguistically challenged.

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It was the kind of utterance that makes professional transcribers question their career choice: “ … there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself — and the Russians, zero.” When President Trump offered that response to a question at a press conference last week, it was the latest example of his tortured syntax, mid-thought changes of subject, and apparent trouble formulating complete sentences, let alone a coherent paragraph, in unscripted speech.

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He was not always so linguistically challenged. STAT reviewed decades of Trump’s on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable.

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In interviews Trump gave in the 1980s and 1990s (with Tom Brokaw, David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Rose, and others), he spoke articulately, used sophisticated vocabulary, inserted dependent clauses into his sentences without losing his train of thought, and strung together sentences into a polished paragraph,

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For decades, studies have found that deterioration in the fluency, complexity, and vocabulary level of spontaneous speech can indicate slipping brain function due to normal aging or neurodegenerative disease. STAT and the experts therefore considered only unscripted utterances, not planned speeches and statements, since only the former tap the neural networks that offer a window into brain function.

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John Montgomery, a psychologist in New York City and adjunct professor at New York University, said “it’s hard to say definitively without rigorous testing” of Trump’s speaking patterns, “but I think it’s pretty safe to say that Trump has had significant cognitive decline over the years.”

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Johnson cautioned that language can deteriorate for other reasons. “His language difficulties could be due to the immense pressure he’s under, or to annoyance that things aren’t going right and that there are all these scandals,” he said. “It could also be due to a neurodegenerative disease or the normal cognitive decline that comes with aging.” Trump will be 71 next month.

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