Ex-president tries to fend off criticisms of mental acuity that plagued Biden as he waffles about sharks and batteries

For those baffled by Donald Trump’s forays into meandering discourses about electrocution, bacons sales or cannibal killers at his recent political rallies, the former US president had an explanation.

Trump assured supporters in Pennsylvania on Saturday that what might look like incoherent ramblings as he frequently departed from his scripted speech were instead indicators of his brilliance that impressed other great minds.

“I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like friends of mine that are like English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,’” he told a bemused audience.

“But the fake news, you know what they say, ‘He rambled.’ It’s not rambling. What you do is you get off a subject to mention another little tidbit, then you get back on to the subject, and you go through this and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.”

But, increasingly, many others are not persuaded, including some of his own supporters.

  • @RememberTheApollo_
    5•8 days ago

    “Formal Thought Disorder” is a facet of dementia.

    How many of these boxes does trump tick where he fails?

    Types and examples of disorganized speech

    • Symbolism: pairing of thoughts with the correct meaning
    • Tempo: the fluidity of words and conversation
    • Processing: quality of thought content
    • Continuity: direction of thought and conversation

    Examples of specific types of disorganized speech may include:

    • Paralogism: unusual word choice
    • Verbal paraphasia: incorrect word usage
    • Literal paraphasia: disordered sounds or sound sequence in words
    • Neologism: creation of new words
    • Displacement: citing a similar idea but not the correct one
    • Contamination: fusing ideas into one another
    • Accelerated thinking: rapid flow and increased volume of speech
    • Flight of ideas: losing track of where a thought is going
    • Inhibited thinking: slow processing of ideas
    • Alogia: restricted speech and/or inadequate relay of information
    • Circumstantial thinking: inability to determine essential information from unessential
    • Desultory thinking: random topic jumps during conversation
    • Derailment: sudden drop in train of thought
    • Omission: inability to recall a main thought point
    • Overinclusive thinking: conversation limits are never identified
    • Echolalia: repetition of words or phrases
    • Palilalia: fast repetition of words or phrases with decreasing audibility
    • Thought blocking: Sudden gaps in thought for no obvious reason
    • Verbigeration: nonsensical repetition of words
    • Incoherence: complete speech disorganization; “word salad”

    https://psychcentral.com/schizophrenia/disorganized-speech