Studies show Donald Trump speaks like a 7-year-old 2nd grader… and, like, we really needed proof of that

It’s not like you really needed a study or survey to prove to you that US president Donald Trump is a dumb fucking fool but studies have been partaken to prove similarly nonetheless.

Modern political leaders often sacrifice clarity for theatrics, using repetition, exaggeration, and emotional appeals to dominate headlines rather than actually inform citizens of the facts. In light of this, a new report examines Donald Trump’s speech patterns and compares them to those of other political leaders.

To build this analysis, the team at PlayersTime examined thousands of words from Trump’s recent interviews, alongside other American and European political leaders. Key metrics include vocabulary diversity, average sentence length, readability, hedge frequency, and recurring signature expressions.

The study compares his communication patterns with those of other leaders to identify stylistic differences, levels of directness, and rhetorical consistency.

Data reveals Trump’s style is big, loud, and impossible to ignore. Across 34,000+ words of interviews, he leans on a small arsenal of 2,180 unique words (10% of his speech), repeating phrases like ‘billions of dollars’, ‘a lotta money’, and ‘have never happened’.

Trump’s sentences are short and punchy, averaging 11 words, so that even a 7-year-old in Grade 2 could follow along. The words are simple, the variety is minimal, highlighting a straight-up gut-level talking, raw and unfiltered.

The report also found that while repetition is a key feature in Trump’s speech, he also frames nearly everything in extremes (‘the biggest’, ‘never seen before’, ‘100%’), structures topics around himself (‘I inherited’, ‘Only because of me’), signals shared understanding (‘You know’, ‘Everybody understands’), and uses numbers symbolically (‘trillions’, ‘millions and millions’), emphasising scale over precision.

Trump’s speech is structurally simpler not only compared with other U.S. presidents, but also when placed alongside major European political leaders. Politicians like Boris Johnson (19.60% unique words), Leo Varadkar (15.70%), Viktor Orban (12.60%), and Emmanuel Macron (11.20%), all tend to speak in longer, more layered sentences with readability levels between 7th and 11th grade.

So, as these comparisons show, even other world leaders are patronising in their political speak, the lot of them treating their adult citizens as though they themselves haven’t even graduated high school.

Michael Mastess