Now that President Donald Trump is officially into the second year of his second term, one prime takeaway — according to New Yorker columnist Susan Glasser — is that he's become much more talkative.
In her Thursday column, Glasser pointed to a recent analysis by the New York Times showing that Trump has uttered a total of 1,977,609 words in public appearances between his second inauguration and January 20, 2026. She pointed out that this marks a 245 percent increase in the number of words Trump spoke over the same window between 2017 and 2018.
"There are many conclusions to be drawn from this astonishing statistic, including the obvious one, that our leader loves the sound of his own voice, and the slightly less obvious corollary that he has no one around him willing or able to tell him to shut up," Glasser wrote. "It’s also true that, in rambling on so much, Trump reveals just about everything one could ever want to know about him—his lack of discipline, his ignorance, his vanity, insecurity, and crudeness, and a mean streak that knows no limits."
Glasser went on to observe how Trump put his loquacious nature on display at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week. She noted that Trump mused on everything from how China supposedly doesn't have wind farms despite selling wind turbines around the world (China in fact has hundreds of wind farms), how he felt the need to impose tariffs on Switzerland because its female prime minister "rubbed me the wrong way" and even incorrectly referring to Greenland as Iceland multiple times. Glasser argued that the main difference between his first and his second term is that Trump seems to have "logorrhea," reminding readers that the word is defined by "excessive and often incoherent talkativeness."
"Trump, of course, was rude, untruthful, and excessively, if not quite so egregiously, long-winded in his first term, too," she wrote. "The difference today, as he presides over a cowed American government, whose checks and balances no longer function as they used to, is that his Administration is far more willing and able to turn his fantastical words into tangible realities. The President, it now seems clear, has the world’s most consequential case of untreated logorrhea."
The New Yorker columnist asserted that while some Americans may have gotten used to Trump's long-windedness, his lengthy speeches are worrying other Republicans, like longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed from earlier this week, Rove fretted that Trump's "rambling speeches" could be evidence of a "downward spiral." She also remarked that Europeans who were not used to Trump's daily soliloquies were far more biting in their criticism of him at Davos.
"Lars-Christian Brask, a deputy speaker of the Danish parliament, no doubt spoke for many in Europe when he responded to this evidence of Trump’s 'mad and erratic behavior' by asking on television whether the President was still capable of running the United States," she wrote. "What struck me was how calm, reasonable, and puzzled Brask’s tone was as he said it. But it’s going to be a long three more years; there’s almost certainly going to be a lot of shouting before this is all over."