My brilliant friend Emily has a degree in Political Science and Government from the University of Chicago, as well as being a software engineer. To satisfy her own curiosity, she did a bit of analysis on both word frequency and average grade level of Trump speeches vs. presidential speeches throughout history. The results are terrifying, if unsurprising.
Trump's speeches are less than half the average grade level (that is, the number of years of education needed to understand a text) than the average presidential speech.
With an average grade level of 5.2, Trump's speeches focus mostly on - well, himself. "I" wins the race by a landslide, and "Don" (his own name) follows soon after ("Trump" makes an appearance as well).
Past presidential speeches, with an average grade level of 10.8, focus heavily on an overarching motif of unity and nationalism - words like "people", "united", "one", and so forth appear again and again.
Here is her visualization of the data, and links to the data sources: codepen.io/…
It’s fascinating to see to what words did and didn’t make the list. Peace? Not a top word for Trump. “Money”, “deal”, and “win” are Trump’s kind of words.