Methinks the whole point of the NYT publishing this article is to expose Trump’s diction and manner of speaking.
It doesn’t matter to me and is irrelevant, but he lacks eloquence and the NYT wants to show that to its elitist readers.
The NYT is about symbolism over substance. Trump has more substance then any President in the past 30 years.
Obama would use twenty vocalized pauses within a minute conversation. Trump virtually never does. You don’t hear him say, “Ahhhh, errr, ahhhh” etc.
+1
Trump speaks exactly the way everyone speaks in casual conversation. The linguist John McWhorter has written a lot about this very topic and shows this clearly.
The transcript that appears in the NYT is the same as released by the WH.
Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush, Donald J. Trump, and Teddy Rooosevelt, all spoke studiously vernacular English every chance they got. It’s often affected, so as to sound like a “man of the people” a la Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson, and to a certain extent it’s expected that Presidents sometimes sound “folksy”. In Trump’s case, he speaks modified New York without the mispronunciations,but with garbled syntax and needless repetitions, which he probably uses for emphasis. Big freakin’ deal.
I think you’re right. Also, I believe Trump’s style is itself a completely different kind of eloquence with far greater value than what you might find in written news media. Lastly, I’d say the general standard for eloquence of language among 2017 journalists has been subjected to several stages of entropy during the past half century.