A 2016 Slate piece called “Trump’s Tower of Babble” cited an analysis concluding that our forty-fifth president’s “loosely woven sentences and cramped, simplistic vocabulary” placed his speech below a sixth-grade reading level (more than four reading levels behind his opponents’ talking styles). A different study found that 78 percent of Trump’s vocabulary was made up of monosyllabic words, and that his most frequently used lexical items included (in the following order) I, Trump, very, China, and money.
