Sometimes, Trump’s remarks read like an old “Dick and Jane” primer.

Case in point: “We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind, only for the oil.”

Of course, this merely reinforces what experts have documented about Trump’s speech patterns. He speaks at the level of an 8 year-old according to one analysis.¹ This president speaks at a grade level lower than any U.S. president since 1929.¹ John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University notes, among other verbal quirks, Trump’s tendency toward parataxis, string together multiple short clauses without joining words or subordinate clauses.².

Interestingly, McWhorter doesn’t conclude that it’s indicative of dementia, but rather an example of a person who has decided he has nothing left to prove. As a consequence, what he utters is the linguistic equivalent of leaving one’s fly unzipped and not really caring about it.