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   From: Desdi@GodSquad.org   
      
   Trump Genius? He Ranks Lowest Among Last 15 Presidents   
      
   President Donald Trump—who boasted over the weekend that his success in   
   life was a result of "being, like, really smart"—communicates at the lowest   
   grade level of the last 15 presidents, according to a new analysis of the   
   speech patterns of presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.   
      
   The analysis assessed the first 30,000 words each president spoke in   
   office, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and more   
   than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty   
   levels. Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry   
   Truman, who spoke at nearly a sixth-grade level.   
      
   At the top of the list were Hoover and Jimmy Carter, who were basically at   
   an 11th-grade level, and President Barack Obama, in third place with a high   
   ninth-grade level of communicating with the American people.   
      
   The Flesch-Kincaid scale was developed in 1975 for the U. S. Navy to assess   
   the relative difficulty of training manuals. A database of Trump's words,   
   compiled by the incomparable factba. se, ran the comparative analysis   
   yesterday, in response to the president's claim that he is "a genius. "   
   flesch scale trump use this   
      
   Trump has been swinging back hard against on the record allegations in   
   Michael Wolff's bombshell new book that members of his own team called him   
   "dumb" and "a dope. "   
      
   In a Saturday-morning tweet, Trump reminded people that he was elected to   
   the presidency "on my first try. "   
      
   "I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius.... and a very stable   
   genius at that! " He also tweeted hat "throughout my life, my two greatest   
   assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. "   
      
   In comments at Camp David later, he added that he was "a very excellent   
   student" and "came out and made billions and billions of dollars ... ran   
   for president one time and won. "   
      
   Factba. se has collected interviews, speeches and press conferences from   
   previous presidents, using material publicly available from presidential   
   libraries, and including the University of California, Santa Barbara's   
   American Presidency Project, which contains presidential press conferences   
   going back to Hoover in 1929.   
      
   The website excluded communiques issued by the last two presidents on   
   social media and limited the study to unscripted words uttered at press   
   conferences and other public appearances.   
      
   The words were run through a variety of lexicological analyses, besides the   
   Flesch-Kincaid, and the results were the same. In every one, Trump came in   
   dead last. Trump also uses the fewest "unique words" (2,605) of any   
   president—Obama was the best at 4,869—and uses words with the fewest   
   average syllables, with 1.33 per word, compared to positively multi-   
   syllabic president Hoover at 1.57.   
      
   "By every metric and methodology tested, Donald Trump's vocabulary and   
   grammatical structure is significantly more simple, and less diverse, than   
   any President since Herbert Hoover, when measuring "off-script" words, that   
   is, words far less likely to have been written in advance for the speaker,   
   " Factba. se CEO Bill Frischling wrote. "The gap between Trump and the next   
   closest president ... is larger than any other gap using Flesch-Kincaid.   
   Statistically speaking, there is a significant gap. "   
      
   The White House is furious at Wolff's book, Fire and Fury, but the book   
   makes a compelling case that West Wing insiders do not have confidence in   
   the president.   
      
   National security adviser H. R. McMaster reportedly called Trump an   
   "idiot" with the intelligence of a "kindergartener" back in November.   
   Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called the president "a fucking   
   moron. "   
      
   And Trump's National Economic Council chief Gary Cohn allegedly wrote in an   
   email that the White House was in chaos.   
      
   "It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns, " Cohn   
   wrote. "Trump won't read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy   
   papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders   
   because he is bored. And his staff is no better. "   
      
   One member of that staff, Stephen Miller, had to be physically escorted   
   from CNN's State of the Union talk show on Sunday in a dispute with host   
   Jake Tapper. Miller declined to discuss specific issues, but repeatedly   
   defended the president.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)