Who Has the Best Words, Trump or Obama? Time (Magazine) Will Tell
Donald Trump's interview with Time magazine was pretty standard for the president: He told a lot of lies and didn't answer a lot of questions. What struck us, however, was that he talks like a 2nd grader, so we investigated.
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When reading Donald Trump’s interview with Time magazine on Thursday, we were struck by the president’s answers. And we don’t mean the lies but rather the manner in which he expressed himself.
One would think that someone who proclaimed to have “the highest of IQs” in the interview would be able to articulate his thoughts in a way that doesn’t sound like a regurgitated social media post. However, that simply wasn’t the case.
Trump sounds like a bot who has been trained exclusively on Truth Social.
Of course, we wanted to be objective about this, so we fed all of the president’s answers to “Hemingway Editor,” a top-rated readability checker.
Here is what we found.
Trump speaks at a 2nd grade level. That’s not an exaggeration, it’s what the program says.
On the one hand, that’s because Trump is not particularly coherent (and perhaps also because elementary schoolers love to brag about themselves). On the other hand, it’s probably also because he uses short sentences, which does not allow him to communicate sophisticated points. The president’s average sentence length is 10.6 words (we eliminated single-word answers so as to not unfairly skew the mean).
In addition, there are certain words and phrases he keeps coming back to. The best example of this is that he uses “a lot” a lot – 41 times in this interview, to be exact. This makes sense since he has a penchant for boasts and exaggerations. In addition, we think it just makes him feel better.
But maybe that’s just how presidents speak to be able to communicate with poorly educated supporters and low-information voters, which are some of Trump’s top demographics.
That’s why we randomly selected an interview that Barack Obama did with Time when he was president so we could compare Trump to one of his predecessors. This one was much shorter (because Trump really loves to hear himself talk) but long enough to give us a good sample.
What we learned from the readability checker is that Obama speaks at a 12th grade level. That actually may not be great, either. The program recommends that communicating at a 9th grade level is ideal.
On average, Obama’s sentences consist of about 27 words, which means they are 2.5 times as long as Trump’s. In addition, while the current president has bragged that he is “very highly educated” and has “all the best words,” it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Obama is much more eloquent.
But, of course, a president’s ability to communicate is not just about using fancy words, so we also fed both interviews into the Truthinator 5000, which measures the accuracy of what a person says. We’d love to tell you how each president did. Unfortunately, it exploded when we uploaded Trump’s answers*.
*Fine, we made the last part up. However, it is unfortunately true that the president talks like a 7-year-old.
