Here’s What I Just Figured Out About the Way Trump Talks

I’ve been spending some time lately studying President Trump’s speeches, and the deeper I go, the more I see something I hadn’t noticed before.

His speaking style has never been conventional; sometimes it’s so improvisatory and so informal that it’s hard to call his addresses “speeches” at all. (Trump himself calls the way he lurches from one subject to the next the “weave,” which is not a bad way to think about it.) But lately it seems to me he’s been leaning in particular on what linguists and grammarians call direct quotation.

If you say, “She told me she only goes........

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