Opinion: Nobody's ever talked the way Trump does. It's like no one before. Or so it seems [View all]

(LA Times) Of all Donald Trump’s rhetorical predilections, one that goes largely unmentioned is his addiction to superlatives. No one has ever seen anything like virtually everything he brings up. Why does he do this? And what does it reveal?

Much of the disinformation in Trump’s nonstop perjuries comes in the form of gross, almost comic exaggeration: He has the largest crowds anyone has ever seen (while his opponent’s are nonexistent, generated by artificial intelligence); the Democrats are not just pro-abortion-rights, they’ve made executing babies legal in six states; as well as whatever it was he said today.

A quick look at Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention in July shows that his dependence on superlatives has overtaken all his other oratorical habits. He used them to describe almost everything he discussed. The criminalization of political disagreement is “at a level that nobody has ever seen before.” The “inflation crisis” is “crushing our people like never before. They’ve never seen anything like it.” As for the “illegal immigration crisis,” well, “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it” either.

When discussing his own presidency, Trump said, “We had an economy the likes of which nobody, no nation had ever seen.” Also under Trump, “We had the most secure border and the best economy in the history of our country, in the history of the world.” That takes us halfway through the speech.

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