The statements coming from the Republican candidate for president are setting many people’s nerves on edge. Our correspondent Mike Rice gives one example this week of an absurd accusation, repeated recently at a rally in Nevada, about schools wantonly performing sex-change operations on children.
That the former TV show host gets away with deranged lies like this has mystified me for years. But lately I’m even more disturbed by his grammar and syntax. It seems to be getting worse.
Peter Baker of the New York Times wrote this week that Trump’s ramblings would surely not pass muster with an English teacher: “Diagraming his sentences with a noun, verb and object can be daunting.”
I was happy to see the Times mention sentence diagraming, which I’ve written about in the past. In an earlier column, I argued that taking apart sentences was fun. Now I think it could save our democratic way of life.
During an appearance at the Economic Club of New York last week, Trump was asked a question about making child care more affordable. His response included the following sentence: “But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.”
News organizations attempted to make sense of this, in a striking example of what Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg calls “one of the most pernicious biases in journalism, the bias toward coherence.” The Associated Press, in a headline, wrote, “Trump Suggests Tariffs Can Help Solve Rising Child Care Costs.”
I don’t think that’s what the sentence says. Let’s try diagraming it.
Start with the main subject and predicate. It might be “you talk about those numbers,” but that’s part of a subordinate clause. Same with “(you) taxing foreign nations.” It’s not “they’ll get used to it” either. Maybe it’s “they’ll have a … tax.” No, the simple truth is that the sentence has no real subject, no object, and no meaning.
Journalists and politicians have been guilty of trying to construct coherent policy out of this kind of nonsense. When party leaders tried to spin some of Trump’s pronouncements into immigration legislation this spring, his own words helped sink the resulting bill.
Sentence diagraming was invented in 1877 by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, who argued that depicting the parts of a sentence by their relation to each other “teaches the pupil to look through the literary order and discover the logical order. The diagram drives the pupil to a most searching examination of the sentence, brings him face to face with every difficulty.”
Isn’t that what we now need most desperately in our struggle to find meaning in political debates? We have failed to distinguish truth from lies. Maybe logic can save us.
