To prove the proposition that has been enunciated in a previous post, viz. “You are what you say,” no one listening to Donald Trump’s public speech this week during press briefings by his Coronovirus Task Force can be unaware of the fact that he incessantly repeats the adjectives “incredible,” “tremendous,” “amazing,” “great,” and “unbelievable,” applying them as qualifiers to nearly every substantive he utters. What is to be discerned in this indiscriminate usage is just that: the inability to discriminate between the items being qualified by these adjectives as to the items’ SEMANTIC VALUE. If everything is “incredible, unbelievable, tremendous,” etc., then this is tantamount to NOTHING BEING DIFFERENT FROM ANYTHING ELSE.

This linguistic habit (along with the catastrophically error-ridden syntax) pervading Trump’s speech is a sign of an underlying pathology––perhaps even of one pathology among several, including anosognosia, the pathological absence of self-awareness. Whatever else is true of Trump, this deficit alone is true and undeniable, and it alone disqualifies him from continuing to serve as the president of the United States.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO