The Coffee Table

Broken bleeper?

Having worked as a speech-language pathologist for more than thirty years, my engrained diagnostic sensors are sometimes activated spontaneously. Like when I first became aware of the man now in the White House. It was during his first run for presidency. (Don’t ask me why I’d never heard of him before. Perhaps because I haven’t had television for decades.) I unofficially diagnosed him as language disordered. He rambled. He rarely uttered a complete sentence. He seemed to just speak whatever words came into his head,

Most of us are able to think a thought, organize the words to express the thought, apply sufficient grammar for the thought to be coherent, and scan the message for social acceptability—all in an instant. We do this continually in conversation. But it seemed to me this presidential candidate was, for some reason, ill-equipped to filter his speech.

That didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t able to think coherently—only that he couldn’t express himself without sounding like his mind was wandering. I didn’t presume he had cognitive problems. I thought he needed speech-language therapy.  

Later, after he was elected president the first time, I heard more actual sentences. Complete thoughts. They weren’t continual. Trump still blared outrageous comments at will. But it seemed he’d been trained to sound a little more coherent. Maybe it was because he had speech writers. Maybe he’d been working with a speech therapist. 

But more recently, the incoherence is returning full force:

“I want to see a tremendous victory. You want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. And again, remember, with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.

“They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s — this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with. And they might keep going a little long. You know, they always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it. Let me tell you, they need it. But it’s going to end very soon. And it’ll end one way or the other. And your gas and your gasoline and all of the things.”

Aside from the disjointed nature of these comments, there’s the problem of a sitting president offering up American cities, and the citizens within, as targets for someone he regards as an enemy. Maybe, for an instant, our president would privately think of such a thing—but to utter it publicly should give all citizens pause—and make us question his fitness for office.  

I’d wager that most of us have flashes of inappropriateness in our heads.  But our prefrontal cortex allows us to filter our speech in real time, so we don’t blurt out something awful. Similar to the way the bad words are “bleeped” out on a radio program—except our brains do the bleeping much faster. And, in general, when personally encountering people whose speech is unfiltered, most of us are on high alert—especially if, in their incoherence, they express violent thoughts. We can’t be sure of their intentions.

Maybe the president’s bleeper is broken. Or maybe it’s not. If it’s not, and Trump’s offering of  American cities  as targets for foreign bombs is not the result of a language disorder, it’s a maniacal act. Which could be a symptom of dementia. Either way, I think it behooves the American public to find out what is troubling their leader. Quickly.