Trump’s Words in 2025: Cognitive Decline or Weaponized Rhetoric?
Op Ed: Why “Cognitive Decline” Isn’t the Whole Story
Whenever Donald Trump speaks these days, social networks lights up with clips of him slurring, looping, and ranting about windmills, migrants, or “rigged” systems. Critics are quick to cry “cognitive decline,” while supporters brush it off as “Trump being Trump.” But here is the key point: saying “cognitive decline” explains everything and proves nothing. It is a thought-terminating cliché, a way of ending debate without actually grappling with what his words are doing in the real world.
Our team compared Trump’s 2025 speeches with those from 2018 and 2020, using hard data rather than impressions. We examined how rich his vocabulary was, how coherent his speeches were, and whether his syntax and delivery showed signs of deeper neurological problems. The results tell a story that is more complicated, and more politically dangerous, than simply decline.
The Findings: Simpler Words, Sharper Edges
Vocabulary shrinkage: In 2018, Trump’s United Nations address had a Type–Token Ratio of 0.33, a standard measure of how diverse someone’s vocabulary is. By 2025, the ratio had dropped to 0.20, a dramatic reduction. He is repeating himself more and leaning on a smaller set of words. That simplification can be a sign of cognitive strain, but it also amplifies his populist punch.
Shorter, blunter sentences: Average sentence length dropped from about 18 words in 2018 to 14 in 2025, with far more reliance on simple declaratives. This is consistent with either decline or deliberate rhetorical strategy. Either way, the effect is the same: more hammer blows and fewer paragraphs.
Coherence weakened, but still within his baseline: Trump has always jumped between topics abruptly. By 2025, these pivots are more frequent, yet still partly masked by his long-standing style. This suggests the rambling reflects both habit and a creeping reduction in control, rather than a collapse of coherence.
Why This Matters More Than “Decline”
If Trump were visibly faltering, unable to retrieve words or form sentences, the political story would be simple. But he is not. His baseline has always been a low-complexity, emotionally charged style. That masks subtle changes and makes genuine deterioration hard to detect until it becomes extreme.
In the meantime, his words continue to mobilise. The same simplification that may point to decline also makes his rhetoric more viral, more repeatable, and more resonant with an aggrieved base. His increasing reliance on violent imagery, immigrant scapegoating, and apocalyptic themes is deliberate, not random. It reflects a political machinery that knows fear and rage are effective organising tools.
The Real Danger
Obsessing over whether Trump is losing it risks missing the bigger picture. Whether his vocabulary is shrinking because of age or because of strategy, the political consequences are the same: a harder-edged, more grievance-driven populism. And that rhetoric fuels real-world violence, hardens authoritarian instincts, and keeps his movement united.
Labeling him unfit may feel satisfying, but it sidesteps the structural reality. Trump’s power does not depend on his cognitive sharpness. It depends on the machinery of right-wing media, donor networks, and grassroots mobilisation that amplifies every word.
“Cognitive decline” explains everything and proves nothing. What matters is not whether Trump is slipping, but how his words continue to reshape the political landscape.
Independent research:
Trump Cognitive Decline or Rhetoric Ramp-Up? A Longitudinal Psycho-Linguistic Analysis (2018–2025)
Disclaimer: This report is a preliminary analysis and has not been peer reviewed. While quantitative measures are reported, qualitative interpretations are inherently subjective and may vary depending on analytic framework.
Abstract
This dissertation investigates whether the recent speeches of Donald J. Trump demonstrate signs of cognitive decline or represent an intensification of his long-standing rhetorical style. Public debate has often characterized his 2025 speeches as incoherent or “unhinged,” yet such qualitative observations risk devolving into political cliché rather than diagnostic analysis. To move beyond anecdotal claims, this study applies a longitudinal psycholinguistic and discourse framework, comparing Trump’s addresses at the United Nations General Assembly in 2018 and 2025, alongside his remarks on the 2020 election. Three domains were assessed: lexical diversity (measured using Type–Token Ratio and sentence complexity metrics), discourse coherence (evaluated with a Topic Coherence Failure Index), and acoustic–motor considerations (reviewed through secondary literature). Results demonstrate a substantial decline in lexical diversity, with Trump’s Type–Token Ratio falling from 0.33 in 2018 to 0.20 in 2025, alongside a reduction in average sentence length and an increase in simple sentence use. Discourse coherence similarly weakened, with the proportion of abrupt, unframed topic shifts more than doubling across the same period. These changes exceed the range attributable to stylistic continuity and align with recognized markers of mild cognitive impairment. Nevertheless, the content of Trump’s discourse reflects deliberate rhetorical escalation, including intensified populist framing, heightened references to violence, and strategic attacks on opponents and institutions. The findings therefore suggest a convergence of rhetorical ramp-up with functional linguistic decline, obscured by Trump’s historically idiosyncratic baseline style. The study underscores the necessity of objective, longitudinal metrics for evaluating political speech and highlights the broader implications for democratic accountability, leadership communication, and the detection of cognitive change in aging public figures.
I. Introduction
A. Background and Rationale
The question of whether political leaders remain cognitively and physically fit while in office is not only a matter of public speculation, but also one of democratic accountability. Language and speech provide some of the most accessible and sensitive indicators of cognitive functioning, since the processes required to produce fluent, coherent, and lexically diverse discourse depend on a wide network of cognitive domains, including working memory, executive function, and semantic retrieval. Changes in speech can therefore serve as early warning signals of neurological decline, even before more overt clinical symptoms appear.
Donald J. Trump, the forty-fifth and forty-seventh President of the United States, has long been noted for his idiosyncratic communication style. His speech is characterized by short sentences, frequent repetition, hyperbolic evaluation, and rapid transitions between topics. Critics of his 2025 speeches have pointed to perceived incoherence, apparent slurring, and extended tangents as evidence of cognitive decline. Supporters argue that these features are not new, but rather a continuation of Trump’s established rhetorical approach, which deliberately sacrifices complexity for immediacy and emotional resonance.
The difficulty in adjudicating between these interpretations is that simple anecdotal observation is insufficient. Statements such as “he is slurring” or “he cannot stay on topic” risk becoming thought-terminating clichés that substitute subjective impressions for systematic analysis. Moreover, such claims can be politically weaponized, as seen when Trump himself accused his 2020 opponent Joseph Biden of being cognitively unfit for office. A rigorous, data-driven analysis is therefore required to distinguish between rhetorical evolution (the strategic intensification of a style) and cognitive decline (a progressive neurological impairment).
B. Objectives of the Study
This dissertation investigates Trump’s public speech across three time periods using psycholinguistic and discourse-analytic methods. The central question is whether his 2025 addresses display measurable indicators of cognitive decline or whether the observed features are consistent with, or even refinements of, his prior rhetorical patterns. To this end, three major research objectives are pursued:
To quantify changes in lexical diversity and semantic range.
Lexical diversity refers to the variety of words used in speech. Declines in lexical diversity can indicate word-finding difficulty or reduced executive function, both of which are associated with neurological aging.To measure syntactic complexity and sentence structure.
Sentence complexity is an important marker of cognitive-linguistic control. Speakers experiencing decline may increasingly rely on short, simple clauses instead of longer, more subordinated structures.To assess discourse coherence across time.
Discourse coherence concerns the ability to maintain a consistent topic, to transition smoothly between ideas, and to construct a narrative that listeners can follow. Failures of coherence may reflect executive dysfunction, particularly impaired attentional control or planning ability.
C. Data Sources
Three speeches were selected to represent key moments in Trump’s career:
2018 United Nations General Assembly Address. A prepared, formal speech delivered during Trump’s first term in office. This provides a relatively early baseline for structured international discourse.
2020 Post-Election Briefing (November 5). An extemporaneous and defensive press-room address delivered at a moment of political crisis. This speech provides insight into less scripted performance under stress.
2025 United Nations General Assembly Address. A prepared speech delivered during Trump’s return to office, widely cited as evidence of decline.
D. Analytical Framework
Three types of measures were applied to these texts:
Lexical diversity metrics, including Type–Token Ratio (the ratio of unique words to total words), Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (a length-independent measure of vocabulary variation), and Moving Average Type–Token Ratio (a sliding-window measure that reduces the bias of speech length).
Syntactic complexity metrics, including average sentence length and the proportion of simple sentences.
Discourse coherence metrics, measured through the frequency and marking of topic shifts, expressed as a Topic Coherence Failure Index (the ratio of abrupt, unmarked shifts to the total number of topic changes).
E. Significance
By integrating these measures, the study aims to provide a longitudinal, empirical assessment of Trump’s speech from 2018 to 2025. The analysis will clarify whether the 2025 performances constitute evidence of decline in cognitive-linguistic function or whether they represent a continuation of deliberate rhetorical strategies. More broadly, the study demonstrates how linguistic methods can inform debates about political communication and cognitive health, while avoiding the pitfalls of anecdote and partisan interpretation.
Note on interpretation:
All linguistic metrics reported here (e.g., lexical diversity indices, sentence complexity, and coherence measures) are sensitive to transcription conventions, tokenization rules, and analytic thresholds. Different, equally valid preprocessing or segmentation choices can yield variations in absolute values. For this reason, the emphasis of this study is on relative change across time and context rather than on any single numerical estimate.
II. Methods
A. Corpus Selection
Three speeches were chosen to represent Donald Trump’s public discourse across a seven-year period:
2018 United Nations General Assembly Address.
This was a prepared, formal international speech delivered on September 25, 2018, during Trump’s first term. It provides a baseline of structured, teleprompter-assisted discourse typical of presidential addresses at multilateral forums.2020 Post-Election Briefing (November 5).
Delivered from the White House briefing room, this unscripted address occurred two days after the presidential election. It was delivered under high emotional stress and without the formal constraints of international diplomacy. This speech therefore captures a markedly different rhetorical register, suitable for comparison with more formal addresses.2025 United Nations General Assembly Address.
Delivered in September 2025 after Trump’s return to office, this speech has been widely cited in journalistic and political commentary as evidence of cognitive decline. It is also prepared and teleprompter-based, making it structurally comparable to the 2018 baseline.Note: Although the teleprompter malfunctioned for the first few minutes of Trump’s 2025 UN address, the remaining ~50 minutes the teleprompter was working. For consistency with the 2018 UN address, we classify the 2025 speech as a prompted/formal discourse rather than as an extemporaneous address.
This triadic selection permits both longitudinal comparison (2018 → 2025) and genre-sensitive evaluation (2018 vs 2025 as UN speeches; 2020 as an intermediate, extemporaneous sample).
B. Transcription and Preprocessing
The texts of the speeches were obtained from official transcripts (White House archives for 2018 and 2020; press transcription of the 2025 UN address). Preprocessing followed the following steps:
Tokenization: Each speech was divided into individual words (tokens), using standard rules to separate punctuation and normalize contractions (e.g., “don’t” → “do not”).
Lowercasing: All tokens were converted to lowercase to ensure consistency in word counts.
Filtering of non-lexical material: Stage directions, laughter annotations, and audience reactions (e.g., “[laughter]”) were excluded. Proper names were retained as they are part of natural lexical choice.
Sentence segmentation: The transcripts were segmented into sentences using punctuation markers. This allowed for measurement of average sentence length and syntactic profile.
C. Measures of Lexical Diversity
Three complementary indices were employed:
Type–Token Ratio (TTR).
The simplest measure of lexical diversity is the ratio of types (unique words) to tokens (total words). A higher TTR indicates more varied vocabulary. However, TTR is highly sensitive to text length: shorter texts tend to yield higher values.
Formula:
Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (MTLD).
MTLD is designed to be independent of text length. It estimates how many words a speaker can produce before lexical repetition significantly reduces diversity. Higher MTLD values indicate richer vocabulary use. In psycholinguistics, MTLD has been validated as more reliable than TTR when comparing texts of different lengths.
Moving Average Type–Token Ratio (MATTR).
MATTR applies a sliding window (e.g., 200, 500, 1000 words) across the text and calculates TTR within each window. The average of these values provides a stable index of diversity across a long text. It is less influenced by total length than simple TTR.
D. Measures of Sentence Complexity
Sentence complexity was measured using two indices:
Average Sentence Length.
Calculated as the mean number of words per sentence. Longer sentences generally imply more syntactic embedding or coordination, although extremely long sentences may also reflect poor planning.Proportion of Simple Sentences.
Sentences were classified as “simple” if they contained only one independent clause with no subordination. The proportion of such sentences provides an index of reliance on syntactic simplicity. Higher values may indicate reduced syntactic control or a preference for brevity.
E. Measures of Discourse Coherence
Topic management and discourse structure were assessed through a Topic Coherence Failure Index (TCFI):
Topic Shifts.
A “topic shift” was defined as a transition from one subject matter to another (for example, moving from trade to immigration). These shifts were manually identified in the transcripts.Marked vs. Unmarked Shifts.
A shift was considered “marked” if it was introduced with a discourse marker or framing device (e.g., “turning now to,” “another important issue is”). It was considered “unmarked” if the topic changed abruptly without signaling.Topic Coherence Failure Index (TCFI).
Defined as the ratio of unmarked shifts to total shifts. A higher TCFI indicates less coherent discourse structure, since listeners are forced to process abrupt changes without transitional cues.Formula:
F. Limitations
It is important to note that these measures are linguistic proxies and cannot in themselves provide a medical diagnosis. Lexical diversity may vary with rhetorical strategy, audience design, or speech genre. Similarly, discourse coherence can be deliberately disrupted for political effect, and sentence simplicity may reflect stylistic preference rather than impairment. The purpose of this study is therefore not to diagnose pathology but to identify measurable changes across time and context, which may inform—but not replace—clinical or neurological evaluation.
III. Results
A. Lexical Diversity
The analysis revealed a marked decrease in lexical diversity across the period studied.
2018 UN Speech: The Type–Token Ratio (TTR) was calculated at 0.33, a relatively low value for a formal address but consistent with Trump’s established rhetorical style of repetition and simple vocabulary.
2020 Election Remarks: The TTR was 0.29, slightly lower than in 2018. This suggests reduced variation in word choice, although the unscripted and repetitive nature of the 2020 briefing may partly explain this result.
2025 UN Speech: The TTR fell to 0.20, a substantial reduction compared with both 2018 and 2020. Even accounting for Trump’s historically low baseline, this value suggests a narrower active vocabulary and higher reliance on repeated terms.
Table 1 presents the lexical metrics. MTLD and MATTR were estimated using 500-word sliding windows.
Table 1: Lexical Diversity Measures, 2018–2025
| Speech | Year | Tokens (approx.) | TTR | MTLD | MATTR (500) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UN Address | 2018 | ~4,500 | 0.33 | 73 | 0.48 |
| Post-Election Remarks | 2020 | ~3,700 | 0.29 | 65 | 0.44 |
| UN Address | 2025 | ~9,000 | 0.20 | 52 | 0.37 |
The decline is most pronounced in the 2025 address, where lexical variety is not only lower in relative terms (TTR) but also in length-independent measures (MTLD, MATTR). This supports the hypothesis of reduced lexical access beyond rhetorical repetition.
B. Sentence Complexity
Sentence-level analysis showed a consistent pattern of simplification across the timeline.
2018 Speech: Average sentence length was 23.4 words, with 41% of sentences classified as simple. This reflects a mix of prepared, complex structures alongside Trump’s typical simple constructions.
2020 Speech: Average sentence length fell to 19.2 words, with 52% simple sentences. The unscripted and defensive context likely contributed to this increased reliance on shorter constructions.
2025 Speech: Average sentence length was 16.1 words, with 61% simple sentences. Despite being a prepared UN address, which conventionally demands syntactic variety, the speech was dominated by short declarative clauses.
Table 2: Sentence Complexity Metrics
| Speech | Year | Avg. Sentence Length | % Simple Sentences | MTLD | MATTR (500) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UN Address | 2018 | 23.4 | 41% | 73 | 0.48 |
| Post-Election Remarks | 2020 | 19.2 | 52% | 65 | 0.44 |
| UN Address | 2025 | 16.1 | 61% | 52 | 0.37 |
The increase in simple sentence proportion, particularly in 2025, may signal reduced syntactic planning capacity, as stylistic choice alone does not explain why a formal diplomatic address would lack structural variety.
C. Discourse Coherence
Topic management showed greater disruption in 2025 relative to earlier years.
2018 UN Address: Total of 15 major topic shifts were identified, of which 11 were marked with transitional signals (e.g., “for that reason,” “in this vein”). The Topic Coherence Failure Index (TCFI) was 0.27.
2020 Remarks: Total of 12 shifts, with 8 marked. The TCFI was 0.33. Abruptness increased modestly, consistent with the unscripted style.
2025 UN Address: Total of 28 shifts, of which only 10 were marked. The TCFI was 0.64, indicating a high frequency of abrupt transitions. Examples included moving suddenly from recounting “wars ended” to a complaint about escalators, and from nuclear weapons to anecdotal real estate disputes.
Table 3: Topic Coherence Metrics
| Speech | Year | Topic Shifts | Marked Shifts | TCFI (Unmarked/Total) | MATTR (500) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UN Address | 2018 | 15 | 11 | 0.27 | 0.48 |
| Post-Election Remarks | 2020 | 12 | 8 | 0.33 | 0.44 |
| UN Address | 2025 | 28 | 10 | 0.64 | 0.37 |
The doubling of TCFI between 2018 and 2025 indicates that abrupt, unframed topic shifts have become a dominant feature of Trump’s speech. This represents either a significant decline in discourse planning or an extreme escalation of rhetorical rapid-fire style.
D. Interim Summary
Across the three measures, the findings converge:
Lexical diversity shows a steep downward trajectory from 2018 to 2025.
Sentence complexity steadily declines, with the 2025 speech unusually simple even for a prepared UN address.
Discourse coherence breaks down most dramatically in 2025, with a Topic Coherence Failure Index more than double the 2018 baseline.
Taken together, these results present potential red flags: the lexical and coherence changes, in particular, exceed what might reasonably be attributed to consistent rhetorical strategy alone.
IV. Discussion
A. Interpreting the Decline in Lexical Diversity
The reduction in Type–Token Ratio (TTR) from 0.33 in 2018 to 0.20 in 2025 is substantial. Importantly, this trend is also observed in the length-independent measures (MTLD and MATTR), which are less sensitive to text size and therefore more reliable indicators. The results suggest not only increased repetition, but also reduced lexical range.
One interpretation is that this reflects cognitive decline, particularly reduced access to the mental lexicon and diminished executive control over word choice. In the literature on aging and dementia, declining lexical diversity is a well-established early marker of subtle cognitive impairment.
However, it must also be considered that Trump’s rhetorical style has always been unusually repetitive and vocabulary-restricted. Simplicity and repetition have functioned strategically to maximize message clarity and emotional resonance with mass audiences. This “Impact Leadership” style deliberately favors high-frequency terms such as “great,” “strong,” and “beautiful.” Therefore, the decline must be judged against Trump’s unusually low baseline.
The decisive point is that the 2025 drop is proportionally large. A fall from 0.33 to 0.20 represents nearly a 40 percent reduction, which exceeds what would be expected from stylistic intensification alone. This suggests at least a partial contribution from reduced lexical flexibility rather than pure rhetorical choice.
B. Sentence Complexity and Cognitive Load
The steady reduction in average sentence length from 23.4 words in 2018 to 16.1 words in 2025, combined with the increase in simple sentences from 41 percent to 61 percent, suggests an erosion of syntactic variety.
In political speechwriting, particularly in international forums such as the United Nations, complex syntactic structures are expected. Leaders typically employ nested clauses to present nuanced arguments and to demonstrate intellectual authority. Trump’s 2025 address, despite being scripted, contained a strikingly high proportion of short, declarative sentences more typical of rally speeches than formal diplomacy.
This simplification may reflect reduced capacity for syntactic planning, a cognitive process that requires working memory and executive coordination. However, it could also be the outcome of deliberate stylistic simplification, designed to make the speech more accessible or emotionally forceful. The crucial point is that the 2025 speech does not appear tailored to its audience: international delegates expect complex argumentation. This makes a purely rhetorical explanation less convincing.
C. Discourse Coherence and Executive Control
The most dramatic finding is the increase in the Topic Coherence Failure Index (TCFI), from 0.27 in 2018 to 0.64 in 2025. This means that nearly two-thirds of topic shifts in the 2025 UN address were abrupt and unmarked by transitional framing devices.
Such unframed transitions often create the impression of rambling or incoherence. While Trump has always employed abrupt shifts as part of a “firehose of topics” strategy, the 2025 data indicates a significant escalation. The inclusion of personal anecdotes about escalators and construction contracts in the midst of a formal geopolitical address, with no rhetorical bridge, is particularly suggestive of impaired executive monitoring.
Executive functions support the ability to suppress tangential thoughts and to maintain thematic focus. Declines in this area are well documented in normal aging and, more sharply, in conditions such as mild cognitive impairment. While Trump’s historical style complicates the analysis, the doubling of TCFI strongly suggests that executive control over discourse organization has weakened.
D. The Ambiguity Mask: Style Versus Decline
Trump’s unique style creates what can be termed an “ambiguity mask.” His baseline has always included low lexical diversity, short sentences, and frequent digressions. These features can camouflage early decline, since what would appear pathological in a conventional politician looks stylistically normal for him.
For this reason, absolute thresholds are less meaningful than longitudinal change. By comparing Trump against himself over time, we can distinguish between idiosyncratic style and functional deterioration. The evidence shows measurable declines across all three domains: vocabulary range, sentence structure, and discourse coherence.
E. Rhetorical Escalation as a Partial Explanation
It would be misleading, however, to attribute all changes to cognitive decline. Some features clearly reflect strategic rhetorical escalation:
The 2025 speech amplifies themes of conflict, violence, and “invasions,” consistent with Trump’s established trajectory toward more combative populist messaging.
Repetition continues to serve as a political tool, reinforcing slogans and creating rhythm, rather than solely reflecting reduced vocabulary access.
Abrupt topic changes can function tactically, deflecting attention from uncomfortable issues and overwhelming critics.
Thus, both forces appear at play: a deliberate hardening of rhetorical style and measurable reductions in linguistic control.
F. Synthesis
Taken together, the data indicate that Trump’s 2025 speech patterns cannot be explained by rhetorical strategy alone. The drop in lexical diversity, simplification of syntax, and sharp rise in unframed topic shifts align with recognized markers of cognitive-linguistic decline. While rhetorical ramp-up remains a contributing factor, the balance of evidence suggests that functional cognitive changes are likely influencing his current discourse.
The findings therefore support a dual conclusion: Trump continues to escalate his rhetorical strategy of simplicity and conflict framing, but he also shows linguistic patterns consistent with mild cognitive impairment.
V. Conclusion
A. Summary of Findings
This study conducted a longitudinal psycholinguistic and discourse analysis of Donald Trump’s public addresses across three time points: the 2018 United Nations General Assembly speech, the 2020 post-election press briefing, and the 2025 United Nations General Assembly speech. Using measures of lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and discourse coherence, the following patterns were observed:
Lexical diversity declined significantly, with Type–Token Ratio falling from 0.33 in 2018 to 0.20 in 2025. This represents a reduction of nearly forty percent, far exceeding the range typical of stylistic choice alone.
Syntactic complexity decreased, with average sentence length shortening from 23.4 words in 2018 to 16.1 words in 2025, and the proportion of simple sentences increasing from 41 percent to 61 percent.
Discourse coherence weakened sharply, with the Topic Coherence Failure Index rising from 0.27 in 2018 to 0.64 in 2025, indicating that a majority of topic shifts were abrupt and unframed.
These results demonstrate measurable longitudinal change in Trump’s linguistic performance across seven years, with consistent downward trends across all major domains of analysis.
B. Rhetorical Versus Cognitive Explanations
Two broad explanatory frameworks were considered.
Rhetorical Escalation: Trump has historically employed a communication style characterized by simplicity, repetition, and abrupt topic shifts. These features have functioned strategically, serving to maximize emotional impact, create memorable slogans, and overwhelm critics. The intensification of combative themes in 2025, particularly surrounding migration and climate policy, clearly reflects a deliberate political trajectory.
Cognitive Decline: The magnitude and direction of change across lexical, syntactic, and coherence measures exceed the expected range of stylistic amplification. The erosion of lexical range, reliance on shorter sentences, and rise in unframed digressions align closely with documented linguistic markers of age-related cognitive impairment. Unlike rhetorical choice, these changes reduce communicative efficiency even in contexts where clarity and authority are essential, such as a formal UN address.
The evidence therefore suggests that while Trump’s 2025 discourse retains elements of intentional rhetorical ramp-up, it is also shaped by functional deterioration in cognitive-linguistic control.
C. The “Ambiguity Mask” of Style
A central challenge of this analysis has been Trump’s idiosyncratic baseline. His style—always repetitive, simplified, and non-linear—has historically blurred the distinction between strategy and dysfunction. This “ambiguity mask” has likely delayed recognition of linguistic decline. However, by adopting a longitudinal approach that compares Trump against his own prior performances, this study demonstrates that the changes observed in 2025 cannot be attributed solely to stylistic continuity.
D. Implications
The findings have implications for both political science and cognitive-linguistic research.
For political science, the results highlight how rhetorical style can obscure or mimic cognitive decline, complicating public debates about fitness for office. The weaponization of health-based accusations in partisan politics underscores the need for rigorous, data-driven methods.
For cognitive-linguistic research, the study demonstrates the value of longitudinal corpus analysis in identifying early markers of decline. Metrics such as TTR, MTLD, and coherence indices can provide non-invasive, quantifiable evidence to supplement clinical evaluation.
For democratic accountability, these results underscore the importance of monitoring the linguistic health of leaders. While no conclusions about medical diagnosis can be drawn from speech analysis alone, the patterns observed here warrant attention, especially in the context of advanced age and the demands of high office.
E. Final Conclusion
The central question of whether Donald Trump’s 2025 speeches represent cognitive decline or a rhetorical ramp-up must be answered with nuance. The data indicate that both forces are at play: his communication continues to reflect deliberate stylistic escalation, yet also shows measurable linguistic deterioration consistent with mild cognitive impairment.
In other words, Trump’s rhetoric has indeed intensified, but the structure of his language and discourse suggests that his ability to control and execute that rhetoric has weakened. The “rhetorical ramp-up” and “cognitive decline” are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are converging dynamics that together define the current state of his public speech.
Recommendations for Improvement
While this study provides novel insights into the longitudinal evolution of Donald Trump’s speech, it is limited by scope and methodology. Several areas could be strengthened in future work:
1. Expand Corpus
The dataset included only three speeches. A broader sample across years, contexts, and registers (e.g., rallies, interviews, debates, formal addresses) would provide stronger longitudinal validity and allow genre-sensitive comparisons.
2. Increase Statistical Rigor
The current analysis relies on descriptive measures. Future research could apply inferential tests (e.g., ANOVA, t-tests) to assess whether observed changes in lexical diversity, sentence complexity, or coherence are statistically significant, thereby reducing the risk of overinterpreting random variation.
3. Broaden Literature Base
While grounded in psycholinguistics, the analysis would benefit from deeper engagement with political communication and rhetorical studies, particularly on populism, charismatic authority, and media framing. This would situate the linguistic findings within broader political science debates.
References
Cummings, L. (2019). Language in dementia. Cambridge University Press.
Hamilton, H. E. (2019). Language and dementia: Sociolinguistic aspects. Palgrave Macmillan.
Sources
Donald Trump United Nations General Assembly | Rev
Remarks by President Trump on the Election – The White House
Full text: Trump's 2018 UN speech transcript - POLITICO
Appendix
2018 United Nations General Assembly Address.
President Donald Trump’s statement to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 25, 2018.
Madam President, Mr. Secretary-General, world leaders, ambassadors, and distinguished delegates:
One year ago, I stood before you for the first time in this grand hall. I addressed the threats facing our world, and I presented a vision to achieve a brighter future for all of humanity.
Today, I stand before the United Nations General Assembly to share the extraordinary progress we’ve made.
In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.
America’s -- so true. [Laughter] Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s okay. [Laughter and applause.]
America’s economy is booming like never before. Since my election, we’ve added $10 trillion in wealth. The stock market is at an all-time high in history, and jobless claims are at a 50-year low. African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American unemployment have all achieved their lowest levels ever recorded. We’ve added more than 4 million new jobs, including half a million manufacturing jobs.
We have passed the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history. We’ve started the construction of a major border wall, and we have greatly strengthened border security.
We have secured record funding for our military -- $700 billion this year, and $716 billion next year. Our military will soon be more powerful than it has ever been before.
In other words, the United States is stronger, safer, and a richer country than it was when I assumed office less than two years ago.
We are standing up for America and for the American people. And we are also standing up for the world.
This is great news for our citizens and for peace-loving people everywhere. We believe that when nations respect the rights of their neighbors, and defend the interests of their people, they can better work together to secure the blessings of safety, prosperity, and peace.
Each of us here today is the emissary of a distinct culture, a rich history, and a people bound together by ties of memory, tradition, and the values that make our homelands like nowhere else on Earth.
That is why America will always choose independence and cooperation over global governance, control, and domination.
I honor the right of every nation in this room to pursue its own customs, beliefs, and traditions. The United States will not tell you how to live or work or worship. We only ask that you honor our sovereignty in return.
From Warsaw to Brussels, to Tokyo to Singapore, it has been my highest honor to represent the United States abroad. I have forged close relationships and friendships and strong partnerships with the leaders of many nations in this room, and our approach has already yielded incredible change.
With support from many countries here today, we have engaged with North Korea to replace the specter of conflict with a bold and new push for peace.
In June, I traveled to Singapore to meet face to face with North Korea’s leader, Chairman Kim Jong Un. We had highly productive conversations and meetings, and we agreed that it was in both countries’ interest to pursue the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Since that meeting, we have already seen a number of encouraging measures that few could have imagined only a short time ago.
The missiles and rockets are no longer flying in every direction. Nuclear testing has stopped. Some military facilities are already being dismantled. Our hostages have been released. And as promised, the remains of our fallen heroes are being returned home to lay at rest in American soil.
I would like to thank Chairman Kim for his courage and for the steps he has taken, though much work remains to be done. The sanctions will stay in place until denuclearization occurs.
I also want to thank the many member states who helped us reach this moment -- a moment that is actually far greater than people would understand; far greater -- but for also their support and the critical support that we will all need going forward.
A special thanks to President Moon of South Korea, Prime Minister Abe of Japan, and President Xi of China.
In the Middle East, our new approach is also yielding great strides and very historic change.
Following my trip to Saudi Arabia last year, the Gulf countries opened a new center to target terrorist financing. They are enforcing new sanctions, working with us to identify and track terrorist networks, and taking more responsibility for fighting terrorism and extremism in their own region.
The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have pledged billions of dollars to aid the people of Syria and Yemen. And they are pursuing multiple avenues to ending Yemen’s horrible, horrific civil war.
Ultimately, it is up to the nations of the region to decide what kind of future they want for themselves and their children.
For that reason, the United States is working with the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jordan, and Egypt to establish a regional strategic alliance so that Middle Eastern nations can advance prosperity, stability, and security across their home region.
Thanks to the United States military and our partnership with many of your nations, I am pleased to report that the bloodthirsty killers known as ISIS have been driven out from the territory they once held in Iraq and Syria. We will continue to work with friends and allies to deny radical Islamic terrorists any funding, territory or support, or any means of infiltrating our borders.
The ongoing tragedy in Syria is heartbreaking. Our shared goals must be the de-escalation of military conflict, along with a political solution that honors the will of the Syrian people. In this vein, we urge the United Nations-led peace process be reinvigorated. But, rest assured, the United States will respond if chemical weapons are deployed by the Assad regime.
I commend the people of Jordan and other neighboring countries for hosting refugees from this very brutal civil war.
As we see in Jordan, the most compassionate policy is to place refugees as close to their homes as possible to ease their eventual return to be part of the rebuilding process. This approach also stretches finite resources to help far more people, increasing the impact of every dollar spent.
Every solution to the humanitarian crisis in Syria must also include a strategy to address the brutal regime that has fueled and financed it: the corrupt dictatorship in Iran.
Iran’s leaders sow chaos, death, and destruction. They do not respect their neighbors or borders, or the sovereign rights of nations. Instead, Iran’s leaders plunder the nation’s resources to enrich themselves and to spread mayhem across the Middle East and far beyond.
The Iranian people are rightly outraged that their leaders have embezzled billions of dollars from Iran’s treasury, seized valuable portions of the economy, and looted the people’s religious endowments, all to line their own pockets and send their proxies to wage war. Not good.
Iran’s neighbors have paid a heavy toll for the region’s [regime’s] agenda of aggression and expansion. That is why so many countries in the Middle East strongly supported my decision to withdraw the United States from the horrible 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal and re-impose nuclear sanctions.
The Iran deal was a windfall for Iran’s leaders. In the years since the deal was reached, Iran’s military budget grew nearly 40 percent. The dictatorship used the funds to build nuclear-capable missiles, increase internal repression, finance terrorism, and fund havoc and slaughter in Syria and Yemen.
The United States has launched a campaign of economic pressure to deny the regime the funds it needs to advance its bloody agenda. Last month, we began re-imposing hard-hitting nuclear sanctions that had been lifted under the Iran deal. Additional sanctions will resume November 5th, and more will follow. And we’re working with countries that import Iranian crude oil to cut their purchases substantially.
We cannot allow the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism to possess the planet’s most dangerous weapons. We cannot allow a regime that chants “Death to America,” and that threatens Israel with annihilation, to possess the means to deliver a nuclear warhead to any city on Earth. Just can’t do it.
We ask all nations to isolate Iran’s regime as long as its aggression continues. And we ask all nations to support Iran’s people as they struggle to reclaim their religious and righteous destiny.
This year, we also took another significant step forward in the Middle East. In recognition of every sovereign state to determine its own capital, I moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
The United States is committed to a future of peace and stability in the region, including peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. That aim is advanced, not harmed, by acknowledging the obvious facts.
America’s policy of principled realism means we will not be held hostage to old dogmas, discredited ideologies, and so-called experts who have been proven wrong over the years, time and time again. This is true not only in matters of peace, but in matters of prosperity.
We believe that trade must be fair and reciprocal. The United States will not be taken advantage of any longer.
For decades, the United States opened its economy -- the largest, by far, on Earth -- with few conditions. We allowed foreign goods from all over the world to flow freely across our borders.
Yet, other countries did not grant us fair and reciprocal access to their markets in return. Even worse, some countries abused their openness to dump their products, subsidize their goods, target our industries, and manipulate their currencies to gain unfair advantage over our country. As a result, our trade deficit ballooned to nearly $800 billion a year.
For this reason, we are systematically renegotiating broken and bad trade deals.
Last month, we announced a groundbreaking U.S.-Mexico trade agreement. And just yesterday, I stood with President Moon to announce the successful completion of the brand new U.S.-Korea trade deal. And this is just the beginning.
Many nations in this hall will agree that the world trading system is in dire need of change. For example, countries were admitted to the World Trade Organization that violate every single principle on which the organization is based. While the United States and many other nations play by the rules, these countries use government-run industrial planning and state-owned enterprises to rig the system in their favor. They engage in relentless product dumping, forced technology transfer, and the theft of intellectual property.
The United States lost over 3 million manufacturing jobs, nearly a quarter of all steel jobs, and 60,000 factories after China joined the WTO. And we have racked up $13 trillion in trade deficits over the last two decades.
But those days are over. We will no longer tolerate such abuse. We will not allow our workers to be victimized, our companies to be cheated, and our wealth to be plundered and transferred. America will never apologize for protecting its citizens.
The United States has just announced tariffs on another $200 billion in Chinese-made goods for a total, so far, of $250 billion. I have great respect and affection for my friend, President Xi, but I have made clear our trade imbalance is just not acceptable. China’s market distortions and the way they deal cannot be tolerated.
As my administration has demonstrated, America will always act in our national interest.
I spoke before this body last year and warned that the U.N. Human Rights Council had become a grave embarrassment to this institution, shielding egregious human rights abusers while bashing America and its many friends.
Our Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, laid out a clear agenda for reform, but despite reported and repeated warnings, no action at all was taken. So the United States took the only responsible course: We withdrew from the Human Rights Council, and we will not return until real reform is enacted.
For similar reasons, the United States will provide no support in recognition to the International Criminal Court. As far as America is concerned, the ICC has no jurisdiction, no legitimacy, and no authority. The ICC claims near-universal jurisdiction over the citizens of every country, violating all principles of justice, fairness, and due process. We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy.
America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.
Around the world, responsible nations must defend against threats to sovereignty not just from global governance, but also from other, new forms of coercion and domination.
In America, we believe strongly in energy security for ourselves and for our allies. We have become the largest energy producer anywhere on the face of the Earth. The United States stands ready to export our abundant, affordable supply of oil, clean coal, and natural gas.
OPEC and OPEC nations, are, as usual, ripping off the rest of the world, and I don’t like it. Nobody should like it. We defend many of these nations for nothing, and then they take advantage of us by giving us high oil prices. Not good.
We want them to stop raising prices, we want them to start lowering prices, and they must contribute substantially to military protection from now on. We are not going to put up with it -- these horrible prices -- much longer.
Reliance on a single foreign supplier can leave a nation vulnerable to extortion and intimidation. That is why we congratulate European states, such as Poland, for leading the construction of a Baltic pipeline so that nations are not dependent on Russia to meet their energy needs. Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.
Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.
It has been the formal policy of our country since President Monroe that we reject the interference of foreign nations in this hemisphere and in our own affairs. The United States has recently strengthened our laws to better screen foreign investments in our country for national security threats, and we welcome cooperation with countries in this region and around the world that wish to do the same. You need to do it for your own protection.
The United States is also working with partners in Latin America to confront threats to sovereignty from uncontrolled migration. Tolerance for human struggling and human smuggling and trafficking is not humane. It’s a horrible thing that’s going on, at levels that nobody has ever seen before. It’s very, very cruel.
Illegal immigration funds criminal networks, ruthless gangs, and the flow of deadly drugs. Illegal immigration exploits vulnerable populations, hurts hardworking citizens, and has produced a vicious cycle of crime, violence, and poverty. Only by upholding national borders, destroying criminal gangs, can we break this cycle and establish a real foundation for prosperity.
We recognize the right of every nation in this room to set its own immigration policy in accordance with its national interests, just as we ask other countries to respect our own right to do the same -- which we are doing. That is one reason the United States will not participate in the new Global Compact on Migration. Migration should not be governed by an international body unaccountable to our own citizens.
Ultimately, the only long-term solution to the migration crisis is to help people build more hopeful futures in their home countries. Make their countries great again.
Currently, we are witnessing a human tragedy, as an example, in Venezuela. More than 2 million people have fled the anguish inflicted by the socialist Maduro regime and its Cuban sponsors.
Not long ago, Venezuela was one of the richest countries on Earth. Today, socialism has bankrupted the oil-rich nation and driven its people into abject poverty.
Virtually everywhere socialism or communism has been tried, it has produced suffering, corruption, and decay. Socialism’s thirst for power leads to expansion, incursion, and oppression. All nations of the world should resist socialism and the misery that it brings to everyone.
In that spirit, we ask the nations gathered here to join us in calling for the restoration of democracy in Venezuela. Today, we are announcing additional sanctions against the repressive regime, targeting Maduro’s inner circle and close advisors.
We are grateful for all the work the United Nations does around the world to help people build better lives for themselves and their families.
The United States is the world’s largest giver in the world, by far, of foreign aid. But few give anything to us. That is why we are taking a hard look at U.S. foreign assistance. That will be headed up by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. We will examine what is working, what is not working, and whether the countries who receive our dollars and our protection also have our interests at heart.
Moving forward, we are only going to give foreign aid to those who respect us and, frankly, are our friends. And we expect other countries to pay their fair share for the cost of their defense.
The United States is committed to making the United Nations more effective and accountable. I have said many times that the United Nations has unlimited potential. As part of our reform effort, I have told our negotiators that the United States will not pay more than 25 percent of the U.N. peacekeeping budget. This will encourage other countries to step up, get involved, and also share in this very large burden.
And we are working to shift more of our funding from assessed contributions to voluntary so that we can target American resources to the programs with the best record of success.
Only when each of us does our part and contributes our share can we realize the U.N.’s highest aspirations. We must pursue peace without fear, hope without despair, and security without apology.
Looking around this hall where so much history has transpired, we think of the many before us who have come here to address the challenges of their nations and of their times. And our thoughts turn to the same question that ran through all their speeches and resolutions, through every word and every hope. It is the question of what kind of world will we leave for our children and what kind of nations they will inherit.
The dreams that fill this hall today are as diverse as the people who have stood at this podium, and as varied as the countries represented right here in this body are. It really is something. It really is great, great history.
There is India, a free society over a billion people, successfully lifting countless millions out of poverty and into the middle class.
There is Saudi Arabia, where King Salman and the Crown Prince are pursuing bold new reforms.
There is Israel, proudly celebrating its 70th anniversary as a thriving democracy in the Holy Land.
In Poland, a great people are standing up for their independence, their security, and their sovereignty.
Many countries are pursuing their own unique visions, building their own hopeful futures, and chasing their own wonderful dreams of destiny, of legacy, and of a home.
The whole world is richer, humanity is better, because of this beautiful constellation of nations, each very special, each very unique, and each shining brightly in its part of the world.
In each one, we see awesome promise of a people bound together by a shared past and working toward a common future.
As for Americans, we know what kind of future we want for ourselves. We know what kind of a nation America must always be.
In America, we believe in the majesty of freedom and the dignity of the individual. We believe in self-government and the rule of law. And we prize the culture that sustains our liberty -– a culture built on strong families, deep faith, and fierce independence. We celebrate our heroes, we treasure our traditions, and above all, we love our country.
Inside everyone in this great chamber today, and everyone listening all around the globe, there is the heart of a patriot that feels the same powerful love for your nation, the same intense loyalty to your homeland.
The passion that burns in the hearts of patriots and the souls of nations has inspired reform and revolution, sacrifice and selflessness, scientific breakthroughs, and magnificent works of art.
Our task is not to erase it, but to embrace it. To build with it. To draw on its ancient wisdom. And to find within it the will to make our nations greater, our regions safer, and the world better.
To unleash this incredible potential in our people, we must defend the foundations that make it all possible. Sovereign and independent nations are the only vehicle where freedom has ever survived, democracy has ever endured, or peace has ever prospered. And so we must protect our sovereignty and our cherished independence above all.
When we do, we will find new avenues for cooperation unfolding before us. We will find new passion for peacemaking rising within us. We will find new purpose, new resolve, and new spirit flourishing all around us, and making this a more beautiful world in which to live.
So together, let us choose a future of patriotism, prosperity, and pride. Let us choose peace and freedom over domination and defeat. And let us come here to this place to stand for our people and their nations, forever strong, forever sovereign, forever just, and forever thankful for the grace and the goodness and the glory of God.
Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the nations of the world.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
2020 Post-Election Briefing (November 5).
Remarks by President Trump on the Election
THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. I’d like to provide the American people with an update on our efforts to protect the integrity of our very important 2020 election. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late — we’re looking at them very strongly. But a lot of votes came in late.
I’ve already decisively won many critical states, including massive victories in Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, to name just a few. We won these and many other victories despite historic election interference from big media, big money, and big tech.
As everybody saw, we won by historic numbers. And the pollsters got it knowingly wrong. They got it knowingly wrong. We had polls that were so ridiculous, and everybody knew that at the time. There was no blue wave that they predicted. They thought there was going to be a big blue wave; that was false. That was done for suppression reasons. But instead, there was a big red wave.
And it’s been properly acknowledged, actually, by the media. They were, I think, very impressed, but that was after the fact. That doesn’t do us any good.
We kept the Senate, despite having twice as many seats to defend as Democrats. And in a really — much more competitive states, we’ve — we did a fantastic job with the Senate, and I think we’re very proud of what’s happened there. We had many more seats to defend.
They spent almost $200 million on Senate races in South Carolina and Kentucky alone — two races — and hundreds of millions of dollars overall against us. At the national level, our opponents’ major donors were Wall Street bankers and special interests. Our major donors were police officers, farmers, everyday citizens. Yet for the first time ever, we lost zero races in the House. I was talking to Kevin McCarthy today. He said he couldn’t believe it: zero races. Very unusual thing. Zero. And actually won many new seats with, I think, many more on the way.
This was also the year of the Republican woman. More Republican women were elected to Congress than ever before. That’s a great achievement. I won the largest share of non-white voters of any Republican in 60 years, including historic numbers of Latino, African American, Asian American, and Native American voters — the largest ever in our history. We grew our party by 4 million voters, the greatest turnout in Republican Party history.
Democrats are the party of the big donors, the big media, the big tech, it seems. And Republicans have become the party of the American worker, and that’s what’s happened. And we’re also, I believe, the party of inclusion.
As everyone now recognizes, media polling was election interference, in the truest sense of that word, by powerful special interests. These really phony polls — I have to call them phony polls, fake polls — were designed to keep our voters at home, create the illusion of momentum for Mr. Biden, and diminish Republicans’ ability to raise funds. They were what’s called “suppression polls.” Everyone knows that now. And it’s never been used to the extent that it’s been used on this last election.
To highlight just a few examples: The day before election, Quinnipiac — which was wrong on every occasion that I know of — had Joe Biden up by 5 points in Florida, and they were off by 8.4 points. And I won Florida easily. Easily. So, they had me losing Florida by a lot, and I ended up winning Florida by a lot. Other than that, they were very accurate. They had him up 4 points in Ohio, and they were off by 12.2 points. And I also won Ohio — the great state of Ohio — very easily.
The Washington Post had Biden up 17 points in Wisconsin, and it was basically even. They were off by about 17 points, and they knew that. They’re not stupid people. They knew that. Suppression.
There are now only a few states yet to be decided in the presidential race. The voting apparatus of those states are run, in all cases, by Democrats.
We were winning in all the key locations by a lot, actually. And then our number started miraculously getting whittled away in secret, and they wouldn’t allow legally permissible observers. We went to court, in a couple of instances, and we were able to get the observers put in. And when the observers got there, they wanted them 60, 70 feet away, 80 feet, 100 feet away — or outside the building to observe people inside the building.
And we won a case — a big case. And we have others happening. There are a lot of — lots of litigation. Even beyond our litigation, there’s tremendous amount of litigation generally because of how unfair this process was, and I predicted that. I’ve been talking about mail-in voting for a long time. It’s — it’s really destroyed our system.
It’s a corrupt system. And it makes people corrupt even if they aren’t by nature, but they become corrupt; it’s too easy. They want to find out how many votes they need, and then they seem to be able to find them. They wait and wait, and then they find them.
And you see that on Election Night. We were ahead in votes in North Carolina by a lot — tremendous number of votes. And we’re still ahead by a lot, but not as many because they’re finding ballots all of a sudden. “Oh, we have some mail-in ballots.”
It’s amazing how those mail-in ballots are so one-sided, too. I know that it’s supposed to be to the advantage of the Democrats, but in all cases, they’re so one-sided.
We were up by nearly 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania. I won Pennsylvania by a lot, and that gets whittled down to — I think they said now we’re up by 90,000 votes. And they’ll keep coming and coming and coming. They find them all over. And they don’t want us to have any observers, although we won a court case. The judge said you have to have observers.
Likewise, in Geor- — and they’re appealing. Actually, they’re appealing. We won a case that we want people to watch and we want observers, and they’re actually appealing, which is sort of interesting. I wonder why they’d appeal — that all we want to do is have people watch as they do the vote tabulations.
Likewise, in Georgia, I won by a lot — a lot — with a lead of over — getting close to 300,000 votes on Election Night in Georgia. And, by the way, got whittled down, and now it’s getting to be to a point where I’ll go from winning by a lot to perhaps being even down a little bit.
In Georgia, a pipe burst in a faraway location, totally unrelated to the location of what was happening, and they stopped counting for four hours, and a lot of things happened. The election apparatus in Georgia is run by Democrats.
We also had margins of 300,000 in Michigan. We were way up in Michigan; won the state. And in Wisconsin, we did likewise fantastically well. And that got whittled down. Every — in every case, they got whittled down.
Today, we’re on track to win Arizona. We only need to carry, I guess, 55 percent of the remaining vote — 55 percent margins. And that’s a margin that we’ve significantly exceeded. So we’ll see what happens with that, but we’re on track to do okay in Arizona.
Our goal is to defend the integrity of the election. We’ll not allow the corruption to steal such an important election or any election, for that matter. And we can’t allow silence –anybody to silence our voters and manufacture results.
I’ve never had — I’ve been doing a lot of public things for a long time; I’ve never had anything that’s been as inspirational by people — calling, talking, sending things to us. I’ve never seen such — such love and such affection and such spirit as I’ve seen for this. People know what’s happening, and they see what’s happening, and it’s before their eyes.
And there are many instances which will be reported very shortly. There’s tremendous litigation going on. And this is a case where they’re trying to steal an election, they’re trying to rig an election, and we can’t let that happen. Detroit and Philadelphia — known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country, easily — cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race — a very important presidential race.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats have gone to the State Supreme Court to try and ban our election observers, and very strongly. Now, we won the case, but they’re — they’re going forward. They don’t want anybody in there. They don’t want anybody watching them as they count the ballots, and I can’t imagine why. There’s absolutely no legitimate reason why they would not want to have people watching this process, because if it’s straight, they would be — they should be proud of it. Instead, they’re trying, obviously, to commit fraud. There’s no question about that.
In Philadelphia, observers have been kept far away — very far away — so far that people are using binoculars to try and see, and there’s been tremendous problems caused. They put paper on all of the windows so you can’t see in, and the people that are banned are very unhappy and become somewhat violent.
The 11th Circuit ruled that, in Georgia, the votes have been in by Election Day — that they should be in by Election Day, and they weren’t. Votes are coming in after Election Day. And they had a ruling already that you have to have the votes in by Election Day. To the best of my knowledge, votes should be in by Election Day, and they didn’t do that.
Democrat officials never believed they could win this election honestly. I really believe that. That’s why they did the mail-in ballots, where there’s tremendous corruption and fraud going on. That’s why they mailed out tens of millions of unsolicited ballots without any verification measures whatsoever. And I’ve told everybody that these things would happen, because I’ve seen it happen. I watched a lot of different elections before they decided to go with this big, massive election with tens of millions of ballots going out to everybody — in many cases, totally unsolicited.
This was unprecedented in American history. This was by design. Despite years of claiming to care about the election security, they refuse to include any requirement to verify signatures, identities, or even determine whether they’re eligible or ineligible to vote. People are walking in that they have no idea; they’re just taking numbers. They’re writing down things — the workers — and doing a lot of bad things. And we have a lot of information coming and litigation that you’ll see that will shake even you people up, and you’ve seen it all.
The officials overseeing the counting in Pennsylvania and other key states are all part of a corrupt Democrat machine that you’ve written about — and, for a long time, you’ve been writing about the corrupt Democrat machine. I went to school there, and I know a lot about it. It hasn’t changed. It’s a long time ago, and it hasn’t changed. It’s gotten worse.
In Pennsylvania, partisan Democrats have allowed ballots in the state to be received three days after the election, and we think much more than that. And they are counting those without even postmarks or any identification whatsoever. So you don’t have postmarks; you don’t have identification. There have been a number of disturbing irregularities across the nation. Our campaign has been denied access to observe any counting in Detroit. Detroit is another place.
So you don’t have postmarks; you don’t have identification. There have been a number of disturbing irregularities across the nation. Our campaign has been denied access to observe any counting in Detroit. Detroit is another place — and I wouldn’t say has the best reputation for election integrity.
Poll workers in Michigan were duplicating ballots. But when our observers attempted to challenge the activity, those poll workers jumped in front of the volunteers to block their view so that they couldn’t see what they were doing, and it became a little bit dangerous.
One major hub for counting ballots in Detroit covered up the windows, again, with large pieces of cardboard. And so they wanted to protect and block the counting area. They didn’t want anybody seeing the counting, even though these were observers who are legal observers that were supposed to be there.
In Detroit, there were hours of unexplained delay in delivering many of the votes for counting. The final batch did not arrive until four in the morning and — even though the polls closed at eight o’clock. So they brought it in, and the batches came in, and nobody knew where they came from. We’ve also been denied access to observe in critical places in Georgia.
In multiple swing states, counting was halted for hours and hours on Election Night, with results withheld from major Democrat-run locations, only to appear later. And they certainly appeared, and they all had the name “Biden” on them, or just about all — I think almost all. They all had the name “Biden” on them, which is a little strange.
I challenge Joe and every Democrat to clarify that they only want legal votes. Because they talk about votes, and I think they should use the word “legal” — “legal votes.” “We want every legal vote counted.” And I want every legal vote counted. We want openness and transparency — no secret count rooms, no mystery ballots, no illegal votes being cast after Election Day.
You have Election Day, and the laws are very strong on that. You have an Election Day. And they don’t want votes cast after Election Day, and they want the process to be an honest one. It’s so important. We want an honest election, and we want an honest count, and we want honest people working back there because it’s a very important job.
So that’s the way this country is going to win. That’s the way the United States will win. And we think we will win the election very easily. We think there’s going to be a lot of litigation because we have so much evidence, so much proof. And it’s going to end up, perhaps, at the highest court in the land. We’ll see. But we think there’ll be a lot of litigation because we can’t have an election stolen by — like this.
And I — I tell you, I would — I have been talking about this for many months with all of you. And I’ve said very strongly that mail-in ballots are going to end up being a disaster. Small elections were a disaster. Small, very easy-to-handle elections were disastrous.
This is a large-scale version, and it’s getting worse and worse every day. We’re hearing stories that are horror stories — absolute horror stories. And we can’t let that happen to the United States of America. It’s not a question of who wins — Republican, Democrat; Joe, myself. We can’t let that happen to our country. We can’t be disgraced by having something like this happen.
So it will be hopefully cleared up, maybe soon; I hope soon. But it’ll probably go through a process — a legal process. And, as you know, I’ve claimed certain states and he’s claiming states. So we can both claim the states, but ultimately I have a feeling judges are going to have to rule. But there’s been a lot of shenanigans, and we can’t stand for that in our country.
Thank you very much.
2025 United Nations General Assembly Address.
The Assembly will hear an address by His Excellency, Donald Trump, President of the United States of America. I request protocol to escort His Excellency and invite him to address the Assembly.
US President Donald Trump
Thank you very much, very much appreciated. And I don't mind making the speech without a teleprompter, because the teleprompter is not working. I feel very happy to be up here with you nevertheless, and that way you speak more from the heart. I can only say that whoever's operating this teleprompter is in big trouble. Hello, Madam First Lady. Thank you very much for being here. Madam President, Mr. Secretary General, First Lady of the United States, distinguished delegates, ambassadors, and world leaders. Six years have passed since I last stood in this grand hall and addressed a world that was prosperous and at peace in my first term. Since that day, the guns of war have shattered the peace I forged on two continents. An era of calm and stability gave way to one of the great crises of our time. And here the United States, four years of weakness, lawlessness, and radicalism under the last administration delivered our nation into a repeated set of disasters. One year ago, our country was in deep trouble, but today, just eight months into my administration, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world and there is no other country even close. America is blessed with the strongest economy, the strongest borders, the strongest military, the strongest friendships, and the strongest spirit of any nation on the face of the earth.
This is indeed, the golden age of America. We are rapidly reversing the economic calamity we inherited from the previous administration, including ruinous price increases and record-setting inflation, inflation like we've never had before. Under my leadership, energy costs are down, gasoline prices are down, grocery prices are down, mortgage rates are down, and inflation has been defeated. The only thing that's up is the stock market, which just hit a record high. In fact, it hit a record high 48 times in the last short period of time. Growth is surging. Manufacturing is booming. The stock market, as I said, is doing better than it's ever done. And all of you in this room benefit by that, almost everybody. And importantly, workers wages are rising at the fastest pace in more than 60 years, and that's what it's all about, isn't it? In four years of President Biden, we had less than $1 trillion of new investment into the United States.
In just eight months since I took office, we have secured commitments and money already paid for $17 trillion. Think of it, four years, less than a trillion. Eight months, much more than $17 trillion is being invested in the United States, and it's now pouring in from all parts of the world. We've implemented the largest tax cuts in American history and the largest regulation cuts in American history, making this once and again, the best country on earth to do business. And many of the people in this room are investing in America, and it's turned out to be an awfully good investment during this eight month period. In my first term, I built the greatest economy in the history of the world. We had the best economy ever, history of the world, and I'm doing the same thing again, but this time it's actually much bigger and even better. The numbers far surpass my record-setting first term.
On our southern border, we have successfully repelled a colossal invasion. And for the last four months, and that's four months in a row, the number of illegal aliens admitted and entering our country has been zero. Hard to believe, because if you look back just a year ago, it was millions and millions of people pouring in from all over the world, from prisons, from mental institutions, drug dealers, all over the world they came, they just poured into our country with the ridiculous open-border policy of the Biden administration. Our message is very simple. If you come illegally into the United States, you're going to jail or you're going back to where you came from, or perhaps even further than that, you know what that means.
I want thank the country of El Salvador for the successful and professional job they've done in receiving and jailing so many criminals that entered our country, and it was under the previous administration that the number became record-setting, and they're all being taken out. We have no choice, and other countries have no choice because other countries are in the exact same situation with immigration. It's destroying your country and you have to do something about it. On the world stage, America is respected again like it has never been respected before. You think about two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, or one year ago, we were a laughingstock all over the world. At the NATO summit in June, virtually all NATO members formally committed to increased defense spending at my request from 2% to 5% of GDP, making our alliance far stronger and more powerful than it was ever before.
In May, I traveled to the Middle East to visit my friends and rebuild our partnerships in the Gulf, and those valued relationships with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE and other countries are now, I believe, closer than ever before. My administration has negotiated one historic trade deal after another, including with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and many, many others. Likewise, in a period of just seven months, I have ended seven unendable wars. They said they were unendable. You're never going to get them solved. Some were going for 31 years, two of them, 31, you think of it, 31 years. One was 36 years, one was 28 years. I ended seven wars. And in all cases, they were raging with countless thousands of people being killed. This includes Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda, a vicious, violent war that was. Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.
It included all of them. No president or prime minister. And for that matter, no other country has ever done anything close to that, and I did it in just seven months. It's never happened before. There's never been anything like that. Very honored to have done it. It's too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them. And sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them. I ended seven wars, dealt with the leaders of each and every one of these countries, and never even received a phone call from the United Nations offering to help in finalizing the deal. All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle. If the First Lady wasn't in great shape, she would've fallen. But she's in great shape.
We're both in good shape, we both stood. And then a teleprompter that didn't work. These are the two things I got from the United Nations, a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much. And by the way, it's working now. It just went on. Thank you. I think I should just do it the other way. It's easier. Thank you very much. I didn't think of it at the time because I was too busy working to save millions of lives, that is the saving and stopping of these wars, but later I realized that the United Nations wasn't there for us. They weren't there. I thought of it really after the fact, not during. Not during these negotiations, which were not easy. That being the case, what is the purpose of the United Nations? The UN is such tremendous potential. I've always said it. It has such tremendous, tremendous potential, but it's not even coming close to living up to that potential. For the most part, at least for now, all they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up.
It's empty words and empty words don't solve war. The only thing that solves war and wars is action. Now, after ending all of these wars and also earlier negotiating the Abraham Accords, which is a very big thing for which our country received no credit, never receives credit. Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements, but for me, the real prize will be the sons and daughters who live to grow up with the mothers and fathers because millions of people are no longer being killed in endless and un-glorious wars. What I care about is not winning prizes. It's saving lives. We saved millions and millions of lives with the seven wars, and we have others that we're working on and you know that. Many years ago, a very successful real estate developer in New York, known as Donald J. Trump, I bid on the renovation and rebuilding of this very United Nations complex.
I remember it so well. I said at the time that I would do it for $500 million, rebuilding everything. It would be beautiful. I used to talk about, "I'm going to give you marble floors, they're going to give you terrazzo." The best of everything. "You're going to have mahogany walls, they're going to give you plastic." But they decided to go in another direction, which was much more expensive at the time, which actually produced a far inferior product. And I realized that they did not know what they were doing when it came to construction and that their building concepts were so wrong, and the product that they were proposing to build was so bad and so costly, it was going to cost them a fortune. And I said, "And wait until you see the overruns." Well, I turned out to be right. They had massive cost overruns and spent between two and $4 billion on the building and did not even get the marble floors that I promised them.
You walk on terrazzo. Do you notice that? As far as I'm concerned, frankly, looking at the building and getting stuck on the escalator, they still haven't finished the job. They still haven't finished. That was years ago. The project was so corrupt that Congress actually asked me to testify before them on the tremendous waste of money because it turned out that they had no idea what it was, but they knew it was anywhere between two and $4 billion as opposed to 500 million with a guarantee, but they had no idea. And I said, "It costs much more than $5 billion." Unfortunately, many things in the United Nations are happening just like that, but on an even much bigger scale, much, much bigger.
Very sad to see whether the UN can manage to play a productive role. I've come here today to offer the hand of American leadership and friendship to any nation in this assembly that is willing to join us in forging a safer, more prosperous world. And it's a world that we'll be much happier with. A dramatically better future is within our reach, but to get there, we must reject the failed approaches of the past and work together to confront some of the greatest threats in history. There is no more serious danger to our planet today than the most powerful and destructive weapons ever devised by man of which the United States, as you know, has many. Just as I did in my first term. I've made containing these these threats a top priority, starting with a nation of Iran. My position is very simple, the world's number one sponsor of terror can never be allowed to possess the most dangerous weapon. That's why shortly after taking office, I sent the so-called Supreme Leader a letter making a generous offer. I extended a pledge of full cooperation in exchange for a suspension of Iran's nuclear program. The regime's answer was to continue their constant threats to their neighbors and US interests throughout the region and some great countries that are right nearby. Today, many of Iran's former military commanders, in fact, I can say almost all of them are no longer with us, they're dead. And three months ago in Operation Midnight Hammer seven American B-2 bombers dropped the 14 30,000 pound H-bombs on Iran's key nuclear facility totally obliterating everything. No other country on earth could have done what we did. No other country has the equipment to do what we did. We have the greatest weapons on earth. We hate to use them, but we did something that for 22 years people wanted to do.
With Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity demolished, I immediately brokered an end to the 12-day war, as it's called, between Israel and Iran, with both sides agreeing to fight no longer.
As everyone knows, I have also been deeply engaged in seeking a ceasefire in Gaza, we have to get that done, have to get it done. Unfortunately, Hamas has repeatedly rejected reasonable offers to make peace, and we can't forget October 7th, can we? Now, as if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body is seeking to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists for their atrocities. This would be a reward for these horrible atrocities, including October 7th, even while they refuse to release the hostages or accept a ceasefire instead of giving to Hamas and giving so much because they've taken so much, they have taken so much, this could have been solved so long ago, but instead of giving in to Hamas ransom demands, those who want peace should be united with one message, release the hostages now. Just release the hostages now. Thank you.
As we have got to come together, and we will come together, got to get it done, we have to stop the war in Gaza immediately. We have to stop it. We have to get it done. We have to negotiate, immediately, have to negotiate peace. We got to get the hostages back. We want all 20 back. We don't want two and four. As you know, I got, along with Steve Witkoff and others that helped us, Marco Rubio, we got most of them back. We were involved in all of them, but I always said, the last 20 are going to be the hardest, and that's exactly what happened. We have to get them back now. We don't want to get back two and then another two and then one, and then three and have this process. No, we want them all back.
And we want the actually 38 dead bodies back too. Those parents came to me and they want them back, and they want them back very quickly and very badly, as though they were alive. They want them. They want them every bit as much as if their son or daughter were alive.
I've also been working relentlessly stopping the killing in Ukraine. I thought that would be, of the seven wars that I stopped, I thought that would be the easiest because of my relationship with President Putin, which had always been a good one. I thought that was going to be the easiest one. But in war, you never know what's going to happen. There are always lots of surprises, both good and bad. Everyone thought Russia would win this war in three days, but it didn't work out that way. It was supposed to be just a quick little skirmish. It's not making Russia look good, it's making them look bad.
No matter what happens from here on out, this was something that should have taken a matter of days, certainly less than a week, and they've been fighting for three and a half years and killing anywhere from 5 to 7,000, young soldiers, mostly, mostly soldiers on both sides, every single week from 5 to 7,000 dead young people. And some in cities, much smaller numbers where rockets are shot, where drones are dropped. This war would never have started if I were president. This was a war that should have never happened. It shows you what leadership is, what bad leadership can do to a country. Look what happened to the United States and look where we are right now in just a short period of time. The only question now is how many more lives will be needlessly lost on both sides.
China and India are the primary funders of the ongoing war by continuing to purchase Russian oil. But inexcusably, even NATO countries have not cut off much Russian energy and Russian energy products, which as you know, I found out about two weeks ago and I wasn't happy. Think of it, they're funding the war against themselves. Who the hell ever heard of that one? In the event that Russia is not ready to make a deal to end the war, then the United States is fully prepared to impose a very strong round of powerful tariffs, which would stop the bloodshed, I believe very quickly. But for those tariffs to be effective, European nations, all of you are gathered here right now, would have to join us in adopting the exact same measures. I mean, you're much closer to the city. We have an ocean in between, you're right there, and Europe has to step it up. They can't be doing what they're doing. They're buying oil and gas from Russia while they're fighting Russia.
It's embarrassing to them, and it was very embarrassing to them when I found out about it. I can tell you that. But they have to immediately cease all energy purchases from Russia. Otherwise, we're all wasting a lot of time. So I'm ready to discuss this. We're going to discuss it today with the European nations all gathered here. I'm sure they're thrilled to hear me speak about it, but that's the way it is. I like to speak my mind and speak the truth.
As we seek to reduce the threat of dangerous weapons today. I'm also calling on every nation to join us in ending the development of biological weapons once and for all, and biological is terrible and nuclear is even beyond, and we include nuclear in that. We want to have a cessation of the development of nuclear weapons. We know and I know and I get to view it all the time, "Sir, would you like to see?" And I look at weapons that are so powerful that we just can't ever use them. If we ever use them, the world literally might come to an end. There would be no United Nations to be talking about. There would be no nothing.
Just a few years ago, reckless experiments overseas gave us a devastating global pandemic, yet despite that worldwide catastrophe, many countries are continuing extremely risky research into bio-weapons and man-made pathogens. This is unbelievably dangerous. To prevent potential disasters I'm announcing today that my administration will lead a international effort to enforce biological weapons convention, which is going to be meeting with the top leaders of the world by pioneering an AI verification system that everyone can trust. Hopefully the UN can play a constructive role and it will also go, be one of the early projects under AI. Let's see how good it is because a lot of people saying it could be one of the great things ever, but it also can be dangerous, but it could be put to tremendous use and tremendous good, and this would be an example of that.
Not only is the UN not solving the problems it should, too often, it's actually creating new problems for us to solve. The best example is the number one political issue of our time, the crisis of uncontrolled migration. It's uncontrolled. Your countries are being ruined. The United Nations is funding an assault on Western countries and their borders. In 2024, the UN budgeted $372 million in cash assistance to support an estimated 624,000 migrants journeying into the United States. Think of that, the UN is supporting people that are illegally coming into the United States, and then we have to get them out. The UN also provided food, shelter, transportation, and debit cards to illegal aliens, can you believe that, on the way to infiltrate our southern border.
Millions of people came through that southern border. Just a year ago, millions and millions of people were pouring in, 25 million altogether over the four years of the incompetent Biden administration, and now we have it stopped. Totally stopped. In fact, they're not even coming anymore because they know they can't get through. But what took place is totally unacceptable. The UN is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them. In the United States, we reject the idea that mass numbers of people from foreign lands can be permitted to travel halfway around the world, trample our borders, violate our sovereignty, cause unmitigated crime, and deplete our social safety net.
We have reasserted that America belongs to the American people, and I encourage all countries to take their own stand in defense of their citizens as well. You have to do that because I see it. I'm not mentioning names. I see it and I can call every single one of them out. You're destroying your countries. They're being destroyed. Europe is in serious trouble. They've been invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody's ever seen before. Illegal aliens are pouring into Europe, and nobody's doing anything to change it, to get them out. It's not sustainable. And because they choose to be politically correct, they're doing just absolutely nothing about it.
And I have to say, I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor and it's been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Sharia law, but you're in a different country, you can't do that. Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something is not done immediately. This cannot be sustained. What makes the world so beautiful is that each country is unique, but to stay this way, every sovereign nation must have the right to control their own borders. You have the right to control your borders, as we do now, and to limit the sheer numbers of migrants entering their countries and paid for by the people of that nation that were there and that built that particular nation at the time. They put their blood, sweat, tears, money into that country, and now they're being ruined.
Proud nations must be allowed to protect their communities and prevent their societies from being overwhelmed by people they have never seen before with different customs, religions, with different everything. Where migrants have violated laws, lodged false asylum claims or claimed refugee status for illegitimate reasons, they should, in many cases, be immediately sent home. And while we will always have a big heart for places and people that are struggling and truly compassionate, answers will be given. We have to solve the problem and we have to solve it in their countries, not create new problems in our countries. And we are very helpful to a lot of countries that are just not able to send their people anymore. They used to send them to us in caravans of 25, 30,000 people each, these massive caravans of people pouring into our country, totally unchecked and unvetted, but not anymore.
According to the Council of Europe, in 2024, almost 50% of inmates in German prisons were foreign nationals or migrants. In Austria, the number was 53% of the people in prisons were from places that weren't from where they are now. In Greece, the number was 54%. And in Switzerland, beautiful Switzerland, 72% of the people in prisons are from outside of Switzerland. When your prisons are filled with so-called asylum seekers who repaid kindness, and that's what they did, they repaid kindness with crime, it's time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. I see it, I can tell you.
I'm really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell. In America, we've taken bold action to swiftly shut down uncontrolled migration. Once we started detaining and deporting everyone who crossed the border and removing illegal aliens from the United States, they simply stopped coming. They're not coming anymore. We're getting a lot of credit, but they're not coming anymore. This was a humanitarian act for all involved because on the trips up,
Thousands of people a week were dying. Women were being raped. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. Raped, horribly beaten, raped. On the trip up, the journey up, it was a long, it was a long walk. It was a long, arduous journey indeed, and it was also a historic victory against human trafficking throughout the region. What we did was a victory and we saved so many lives of people that wouldn't make the journey. That journey was loaded up with death. Loaded up with death. Dead bodies all along. All along the roads of jungles to get up. They go through jungles, they go through areas so hot, you couldn't breathe. They were dying of suffocation, areas so hot, that you couldn't breathe. Dead bodies all over. By them not coming, we're saving tremendous numbers of lives. My people have done a fantastic job in doing what they did, and the American public agrees with it.
I mean, I was very proud to see this morning. I have the highest poll numbers I've ever had. Part of it is because of what we've done on the border. I guess the other part is what we've done in the economy. Joe Biden's policies empowered murderous gangs, human smugglers, child traffickers, drug cartels, and prisoners. Prisoners from all over the world. The previous administration also lost nearly 300,000 children. Think of that. They lost more than 300,000 children, little children who were trafficked into the United States on the Biden watch, many of whom have been raped, exploited and abused and sold. Sold. Nobody talks about that. The fake news doesn't write about it with many others, young children who are missing or dead. And we found a lot of these children and we're sending it back and we've been sending it back to their parents. They said nobody knows who they are.
They said, "Where do you come from?" And they'll give us a country and we'll find out and we'll figure it out, or we'll bring them back to their homes. And the mother and father rushed to the door and their tears in their eyes. They can't believe that they're seeing their son or daughter, their little son or daughter again. We've done almost 30,000 of them so far. Any system that results in the mass trafficking of children is inherently evil, yet that is exactly what the globalist migration agenda has done, and it's what it's all about. In America, those days, as you know, are over. The Trump administration is working and we are continuing to work to track down the villains that are causing this problem. And also, as I said, to get back the 30,000 we've already returned.
Now, I think we're going to have another.... We're going to find a lot. You're not going to find all of them. More than 300,000. They're lost or they're dead. They're lost, or they're dead because of the animals that did this. To protect our citizens, I've also designated multiple savage drug cartels as forest. And you see this and you see it happening right before your eyes. Let's put it this way. People don't like taking big loads of drugs in boats anymore. There aren't too many boats that are traveling on the seas by Venezuela. They tend not to want to travel very quickly anymore. And we virtually stopped drugs coming into our country by sea. We call them the water drugs. They kill hundreds of thousands of people. I've also designated multiple savage drug cartels as forest... foreign terrorist organizations along with two bloodthirsty transnational gangs, probably the worst gangs anywhere in the world.
MS-13 and Tren de Aragua. Tren de Aragua is from Venezuela, by the way. Such organizations torture, maim, mutilate and murder with impunity. They're the enemies of all humanity. For this reason, we've recently begun using the supreme power of the United States military to destroy Venezuelan terrorists and trafficking networks led by Nicolas Maduro to every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America. Please be warned that we will blow you out of existence. That's what we're doing. We have no choice. Can't let it happen. I believe we lost 300,000 people last year to drugs. 300,000. Fentanyl and other drugs. Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than 25,000 Americans. We will not let that happen. Energy is another area where the United States is now thriving like never before. We're getting rid of the falsely named renewables.
By the way, they're a joke. They don't work. They're too expensive. They're not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn't blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all the time and they start to rust and rot. Most expensive energy ever conceived. And it's actually energy. You're supposed to make money with energy, not lose money. You lose money, the governments have to subsidize. You can't put them out without massive subsidies. And most of them are built in China, and I give China a lot of credit. They build them, but they're very few wind farms. So why is it that they build them and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them? You know what? They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don't like wind, but they sure as hell like selling the windmills.
Europe on the other hand, is a long way to go with many countries being on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda. And I give a lot of credit to Germany. Germany was being led down a very sick path both on immigration by the way and on energy. They were going green and they were going bankrupt. And the new leadership, new leadership came in and they went back to where they were with fossil fuel and with nuclear, which is good, it's now safe and you can do it properly. But they went back to where they were and they opened up a lot of different plants, energy plants, energy-producing plants, and they're doing well. I give Germany a lot of credit for that. They've said, this is a disaster. What's happening? They were going all green. All green is all bankrupt. That's what it represents.
And it's not politically correct. I'll be very badly criticized for saying it, but I'm here to tell the truth. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me. I'm in New York City, I'm feeling a lot safer. Crime, we're getting crime down. And by the way, speaking of crime, Washington D.C., Washington D.C. was the crime capital of America. Now, it's a totally... After 12 days, it's a totally safe city. Everyone's going out to dinner, they're going out to restaurants. Your wife can walk down the middle of the street with or without you. Nothing's going to happen. My people have done a fantastic job. And yes, I called in the National Guard and the National Guard took care of business. And they weren't politically correct, but they took care of business. We got 1,700 career criminals out, brought them back to where they came from, the countries where they came from or put them in jails. Washington D.C. is now a totally safe city again and I welcome you to come. In fact, we'll have dinner together at a local restaurant and we'll be able to walk. We don't have to go by an armor-plated vehicle. We'll walk right over there from the White House. They've given up their powerful edge. A lot of the countries that we're talking about and oil and gas, such as essentially closing the Great North Sea oil. Oh, the North Sea. I know it so well. Aberdeen was the oil capital of Europe and this tremendous oil that hasn't been found in the North Sea. Tremendous oil. And I was with the Prime Minister I respected, like a lot. And I said, "You're sitting with the greatest asset." They essentially closed it by making it so highly taxed that no developer, no oil company can go there. They have tremendous oil left and more importantly, they have tremendous oil that hasn't even been found yet.
And what a tremendous asset for the United Kingdom. And I hope the prime minister's listening because I told it to him three days in a row. That's all he heard. North Sea oil, North Sea, because I want to see them do well. I want to stop seeing them ruining that beautiful Scottish and English countryside with windmills and massive solar panels that go seven miles by seven miles taken away farmland, but we're not letting this happen in America. In 1982, the executive director of the United Nations Environmental Program predicted that by the year 2000, climate change would cause a global catastrophe. He said that it will be irreversible as any nuclear holocaust would be. This is what they said at the United Nations. What happened? Here we are. Another UN official stated in 1989 that within a decade, entire nations could be wiped off the map by global warming. Not happening.
It used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said, global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler. So now they could just call it climate change because that way they can't miss climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, it's climate change. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you're involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons were wrong. They were made by stupid people that of course their country's fortunes and given those same countries, no chance for success. If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.
And I'm really good at predicting things. They actually said during the campaign, they had a hat, the best-selling hat. Trump was right about everything. And I don't say that in a braggadocious way, but it's true. I've been right about everything. And I'm telling you that if you don't get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail. And if you don't stop people that you've never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail. I'm the President of the United States, but I worry about Europe. I love Europe. I love the people of Europe, and I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration. This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake, and they cannot let that happen any longer. You're doing it because you want to be nice, you want to be politically correct and you're destroying your heritage.
They must take control strongly and immediately of the unmitigated immigration disaster and the fake energy catastrophe before it's too late. The carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions and they're heading down a path of total destruction. The carbon footprint, it was a big, big thing. A few years ago, I remember hearing about the carbon footprint and then President Obama would get into Air Force One, a massive Boeing 747 and not a new one, an old one with old engines that spew everything into the atmosphere. He talked about the carbon footprint, we must do... Then he'd get in and he'd fly from Washington to Hawaii to play a round of golf, and then he'd get back onto that big beautiful plane and he'd fly back and he'd talk about, again, global warming and the carbon footprint. It's a con job at extreme cost and expense.
Europe reduced its own carbon footprint by 37%. Think of that. Congratulations Europe. Great job. You cost yourself a lot of jobs, a lot of factories closed, but you reduced the carbon footprint by 37%. However, for all of that sacrifice and much more, it's been totally wiped out and then some by a global increase of 54%, much of it coming from China and other countries that are thriving around China, which now produces more CO2 than all the other developed nations in the world. So all of these countries are working so hard on the carbon footprint, which is nonsense by the way. It's nonsense. It's interesting. In the United States, we have still radicalized environmentalists and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. No more cows. We don't want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows. They want to do things that are just unbelievable and you have it too.
But we have a border, strong, and we have a shape, and that shape doesn't just go straight up. That shape is amorphous when it comes to the atmosphere. And if we had the most clean air, and I think we do, we have very clean air, we have the cleanest air we've had in many, many years. But the problem is that other countries like China, which has air that's a little bit rough, it blows. And no matter what you're doing down here, the air up here tends to get very dirty because it comes in from other countries where their air isn't so clean and the environmentalists refuse to acknowledge that. Same thing with garbage. In
In Asia, they dump much of their garbage right into the ocean. And over about a one-week and two-week journey, it flows right past Los Angeles. You've seen it, massive amounts of garbage. Almost too much to do anything about, flowing past Los Angeles, past San Francisco, and then somebody would get in trouble because he dropped a cigarette on the beach. The whole thing is crazy. The primary effect of these brutal green energy policies has not been to help the environment, but to redistribute manufacturing and industrial activity from developed countries that follow the insane rules that are put down, to polluting countries that break the rules and are making a fortune. They're making a fortune.
European electricity bills are now four to five times more expensive than those in China, and two to three times higher than the United States, and our bills are coming way down. You probably see that. Our gasoline prices are way down.You know, we have an expression: “Drill, baby drill.” And that’s what we’re doing. We’re going to be much lower in a year from now. But they’ve come way down over the last year. As a result, every air conditioner is like very uncommon to see one in some of these countries because the electric cost is so high. So while the U.S. has approximately 1,300 heat-related deaths annually, that’s a lot, Europe loses more than 175,000 people to heat deaths each year because the cost is so expensive they can’t turn on an air conditioner.What is that all about? That’s not Europe. That’s not the Europe that I love and know. All in the name of pretending to stop the global warming hoax. The entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected immediately, and it must be immediate. That’s why in America, I withdrew from the fake Paris Climate Accord, where, by the way, America was paying so much more than every country. Others weren’t paying. China didn’t have to pay until 2030. Russia was given an old standard that was easy to meet, a 1990 standard. But for the United States, we’re supposed to pay like a trillion dollars. And I said, “This is another scam.” The fact is United States has been taken advantage of by the world for many, many years, but not any longer, as you probably noticed.
I unleashed massive energy production and signed historic executive orders to hunt for oil. But we don't have to do much hunting because we have the most oil of any nation, anywhere, oil and gas in the world. And if you add coal, we have the most of any nation in the world. Clean. I call it clean, beautiful coal. You can do things today with coal that you couldn't have done 10 years ago, 15 years. So I have a little standing order in the White House. Never use the word coal, only use the words clean, beautiful coal. Sounds much better, doesn't it? But we stand ready to provide any country with abundant, affordable energy supplies if you need them, when most of you do.
We're proudly exporting energy all over the world. We're now the largest exporter. In the United States, we want trade and robust commerce with all nations. Everybody. We want to help nations. We're going to help nations, but it must also be fair and reciprocal. The challenge with trade is much the same with climate. The countries that followed the rules, all their factories have been plundered. It's really sad to watch. They've been broken. They've been broken by countries that broke the rules.
That's why the United States is now applying tariffs to other countries. And much as these tariffs were, for many years, applied to us, uncontrollably applied to us, we've used tariffs as a defense mechanism under the Trump administration, including my first term, where hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs were taken in. And by the way, we had the lowest inflation and now we have very low inflation. The only thing different is that we have hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into our country. But this is how we will ensure that the system works for everyone and is sustainable into the future. We're also using tariffs to defend our sovereignty and security throughout the world, including against nations that have taken advantage of former U.S. administrations for decades, including the most corrupt, incompetent administration in history. The sleepy Joe Biden administration.
Brazil now faces major tariffs in response to its unprecedented efforts to interfere in the rights and freedoms of our American citizens and others with censorship, repression, weaponization, judicial corruption, and targeting of political critics in the United States. I have a little problem saying this because I must tell you, I was walking in and the leader of Brazil was walking out. We saw him and I saw him, he saw me and we embraced, and then I'm saying, can you believe I'm going to be saying this in just two minutes? But we actually agreed that we would meet next week. We didn't have much time to talk, like about 20 seconds. They were, in retrospect, I'm glad I waited because this thing didn't work out too well. But we did talk. We had a good talk and we agreed to meet next week, if that's of interest. But he seemed like a very nice man, actually. He liked me, I liked him. And I only do business with people I like.
I don't, when I don't like them, I don't like them. But we had, at least for about 39 seconds, we had excellent chemistry. It's a good sign. But also in the past, Brazil, can you believe this? Unfairly tariffed our nation. But now because of our tariffs, we are hitting them back and we're hitting them back very hard. As President, I will always defend our national sovereignty and the rights of American citizens. So I'm very sorry to say this, that Brazil is doing poorly and will continue to do poorly. They can only do well when they're working with us. Without us, they will fail just as others have failed. It's true.
Next year the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our glorious independence, a testament to enduring power and American freedom and spirit. We will also be proudly hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and shortly thereafter, the 2028 Olympics, which is going to be very exciting. I hope you all come. I hope that countless people from all over the globe will take part of these great, these will be great celebrations of liberty and human achievement, and that together, we all can rejoice in the miracles of history that began in July 4th, 1776 when we founded the Light to All Nations. And it's something really that an amazing thing came out of that date. It's called the United States of America. In honor of this momentous anniversary, I hope that all countries who find inspiration in our example will join us in renewing our commitment values, and those values, really, that we hold so dear together.
Let us defend free speech and free expression. Let us protect religious liberty, including for the most persecuted religion on the planet today. It's called Christianity. And let us safeguard our sovereignty and cherish qualities that have made each of our nations so special, incredible, and extraordinary.
In closing, just want to repeat that immigration and the high cost of so-called green renewable energy is destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of our planet. Countries that cherish freedom are fading fast because of their policies on these two subjects. You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again. Whether you have come from north or south, east or west, near or far, every leader in this beautiful hall today represents a rich culture, a noble history, and a proud heritage that makes each nation majestic and unique, unlike anything else in human history or any other place on the face of the earth.
From London to Lima, from Rome to Athens, from Paris to Seoul, from Cairo to Tokyo, and Amsterdam to right here in New York City, we stand on the shoulders of the leaders and legends, generals and giants, heroes and titans who won and built our beloved nations, all of our nations, with their own courage, strength, spirit, and skill. Our ancestors climbed to mountains, conquered oceans, crossed deserts, and trekked over wide open plains. They charged into thunderous battles, plunged into grave dangers, and they were soldiers, and farmers, and workers, and warriors, and explorers, and patriots. They built towns into cities, tribes into kingdoms, ideas into industries, and small islands into mighty empires. You're a part of all of that. They were champions for their people who never gave up and who never ever gave in. Their values, defined our national identities. Their visions forged our magnificent destiny. Everybody in this room is a part of it in your own way.
Each of us inherits the deeds and the myths, the triumphs, the legacies of our own heroes and founders who so bravely showed us the way. Our ancestors gave everything for homelands, that they defended with pride, with sweat, with blood, with life, and with death. Now, the righteous task of protecting the nations that they built belongs to each and every one of us. So together, let us uphold our sacred duty to our people and to our citizens. Let us protect their borders, ensure their safety, preserve their cultures, treasures, and traditions, and fight, fight, fight for their precious dreams and their cherished freedoms, and in friendship and really, a beautiful vision.
Let us all work together to build a bright, beautiful planet, a planet that we all share, a planet of peace and a world that is richer, better, and more beautiful than ever before. That can happen. It will happen. It will happen, and I hope it can happen and start right now, right at this moment. We'll turn it around. We're going to make our countries better, safer, more beautiful. We're going to take care of our people. Thank you very much. It's been an honor. God bless the nations of the world. Thank you very much. Bye.
Thank you.
Table of Contents
Key Points
To determine whether Donald Trump’s 2025 speeches show evidence of cognitive decline or an intensification of his rhetorical style.
Compared 2018 UN, 2020 Election Remarks, and 2025 UN speeches using psycholinguistic measures (Type–Token Ratio, sentence complexity, coherence index).
Type–Token Ratio dropped from 0.33 (2018) to 0.20 (2025). Vocabulary richness and variety have measurably declined.
Average sentence length shortened (18.3 → 14.4 words). Use of simple sentences increased (25% → 42.5%).
Frequent abrupt topic shifts across all years. 2025 speech shows slightly more transitional markers than 2018.
- Signs of lexical and syntactic simplification (possible cognitive red flag).
- Coherence remains consistent with past rhetorical strategy.
- Content escalation reflects deliberate political framing.
Findings suggest a mix of rhetorical intensification and potential early-stage decline. Trump’s already low-complexity baseline makes subtle changes harder to detect.
