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Which Candidate Communicates Best

6 min readJul 12, 2024

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Photo by Elvert Barnes on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

While we are all panicking about the obvious difficulties that Joe Biden has been having lately, I think we need to take a deep breath and remember a few things.

Certainly, the President is getting old and frail, and his communication skills are degrading by the week. He may not be the best person to defeat Donald Trump, but for now, he’s the guy we’ve got. Rambling sentences and all, he is the candidate.

As a retired speech/language pathologist with years of diagnostic experience, I’m dismayed, to say the least, about what I hear from the President. I believe that we need a leader who can clearly articulate his thoughts, his beliefs and his plans to Congress, to other international leaders and, not least, to the American people.

But before I completely despair over Biden’s communication skills, I want to remind myself and others of the fact that Donald Trump’s expressive language is far, far worse.

The first time I wrote about what sounded to me like an expressive language disorder was after hearing Trump give his acceptance speech after his nomination in 2015. At that time, I noticed that as he spoke, he slightly misused words, ended sentences in the middle and jumped from topic to topic.

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Babel
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Published in Babel

Babel aims to be a leading publication for stories about all forms of human expression on Medium, dedicated to celebrating the captivating diversity of human achievements in art and craft.

Karen Shiebler
Karen Shiebler

Written by Karen Shiebler

A Mother, a grandmother, a progressive voter. I write because it’s getting harder to march and because words are my weapon. I blog at momshieb.wordpress.com