Conservative radio host Glenn Beck just isn’t a fan of Donald Trump, and he continued to say as much Wednesday when he likened the 2016 GOP presidential candidate’s debate style to that of a small child.
“Honestly, it is like having a debate with a fourth-grader. When you listen to him, it is. It really is,” Beck said on his radio program.
His comments came as he and his co-hosts played audio of Trump explaining his solutions to dealing with the current immigration crisis.
Beck is not alone in suggesting Trump talks like a child, as multiple reports and media analyses have made this exact comparison all throughout the 2016 election cycle.
“Trump tops GOP field while talking to voters at fourth-grade level,” a Boston Globe analysis found last week.
“[W]ith his own choice of words and his short, simple sentences, Trump’s speech could have been comprehended by a fourth-grader. Yes, a fourth-grader,” the report read.
The Globe’s analysis found that of all presidential candidates, “Trump is speaking at the lowest level. He used fewer characters per word in his announcement speech, fewer syllables per word, and his sentences were shorter than all other candidates.”
“His vocabulary is filled with words like ‘huge,’ ‘terrible,’ ‘beautiful.’ He speaks in punchy bursts that lack nuance. It’s all easily grasped, whether it’s his campaign theme (‘Make America Great Again’), words about his wealth (‘I’m really rich’), or his disparagement of the Washington culture (‘Politicians are all talk, no action’),” the report added. “He dismisses his opponents with snippy sound bites that, if polls are to be believed, have been devastatingly effective — such as when he labeled Jeb Bush ‘low-energy.'”
Politico reported much of the same in August.
“Donald Trump isn’t a simpleton, he just talks like one,” wrote Politico’s Jack Shafer. “If you were to market Donald Trump’s vocabulary as a toy, it would resemble a small box of Lincoln Logs.”
“In the August 6th Republican candidates debate, Trump answered the moderators’ questions with linguistic austerity. Run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, his text of responses score at the 4th-grade reading level,” he added. “For Trump, that’s actually pretty advanced.”
