'Genius' Trump has worst vocabulary of any modern US president
President Donald Trump—who boasted over the weekend that his success in life was a result of “being, like, really smart”—communicates at the lowest grade level of the last 15 presidents, according to a new analysis of the speech patterns of presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.
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President Donald Trump has the worst vocabulary of any modern president, a new analysis found.
The analysis assessed the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and more than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels. Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry Truman, who spoke at nearly a sixth-grade level.
At the top of the list were Hoover and Jimmy Carter, who were basically at an 11th-grade level, and President Barack Obama, in third place with a high ninth-grade level of communicating with the American people.
The Flesch-Kincaid scale was developed in 1975 for the U.S. Navy to assess the relative difficulty of training manuals biased on word length and sentence length. A database of Trump’s words, compiled by the incomparable factba.se, ran the comparative analysis yesterday, in response to the president’s claim that he is “a genius.”
President Donald Trump talks with journalists after signing tax reform legislation into law in the Oval Office on December 22, 2017. Trump praised Republican leaders in Congress for all their work on the biggest tax overhaul in decades. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Trump has been swinging back hard against on the record allegations in Michael Wolff's bombshell new book that members of his own team called him “dumb” and “a dope.”
In a Saturday-morning tweet, Trump reminded people that he was elected to the presidency “on my first try.”
“I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!” He also tweeted hat “throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart."
In comments at Camp David later, he added that he was “a very excellent student” and “came out and made billions and billions of dollars ... ran for president one time and won.”
Factba.se has collected interviews, speeches and press conferences from previous presidents, using material publicly available from presidential libraries, and including the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, which contains presidential press conferences going back to Hoover in 1929.
The website excluded communiques issued by the last two presidents on social media and limited the study to unscripted words uttered at press conferences and other public appearances.
Read more: yahoo.com
