From our To Know Trump (established in 2010!) desk

Last month STAT’s Sharon Begley wrote this piece about Donald Trump’s increasing disconnection with the English language.

Trump wasn’t always so linguistically challenged. What could explain the change?

It was the kind of utterance that makes professional transcribers question their career choice:

“ … there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself — and the Russians, zero.”

When President Trump offered that response to a question at a press conference last week, it was the latest example of his tortured syntax, mid-thought changes of subject, and apparent trouble formulating complete sentences, let alone a coherent paragraph, in unscripted speech.

This is nuts graf.

STAT reviewed decades of Trump’s on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable.

(Check out this very nuanced exploration of those differences on Slate’s irrepressible Trumpcast.)

Now comes Exhibit Umpteen, courtesy of the essential Maggie Haberman in her New York Times piece yesterday that detailed Trump’s latest interview on White House organ Fox & Friends, in which he tapewormed about his conversations with fired FBI director James Comey.

“I’ve been reading about it for the last couple of months, about the seriousness of the horribleness of the situation with surveillance all over the place,” the president said in the interview. “So you never know what’s out there. But I didn’t tape, and I don’t have any tape and I didn’t tape.”

That is one pre-verbal President of the United States.

Scary, yeah?