A Little "Excursion?"
Incurring Confusion With Donald Trump
Donald Trump loves talking, but he doesn’t know too many words. His ghostwriter on The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz said,
“It’s a 200-word vocabulary, so as soon he gets beyond that, you know that he’s reading someone else’s words.”
When he tries to learn a new word, things can go badly.
Watch this:
Late night hosts mocked Trump for using the word “excursion,” but it’s clear that’s not what he meant. The invaluable Taegan Goddard gets it right. Become a member of Political Wire to get his Talking Points column.
It’s fairly obvious what happened. Someone in the White House likely advised Trump to downplay the war with Iran as an “incursion.”
But Trump heard “excursion.” And now he keeps repeating it over and over.
The slip might be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high.
Referring to a war as an “excursion” makes it sound less like a military conflict and more like a weekend getaway.
Yet no one around the president appears willing to correct him — which may say a lot about why we’re in this war in the first place.
The health and medicine newsroom STAT investigated Trump’s use of language back in 2017, and found some surprising results.
In interviews Trump gave in the 1980s and 1990s (with Tom Brokaw, David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Rose, and others), he spoke articulately, used sophisticated vocabulary, inserted dependent clauses into his sentences without losing his train of thought, and strung together sentences into a polished paragraph, which — and this is no mean feat — would have scanned just fine in print.
Trump fluently peppered his answers with words and phrases such as “subsided,” “inclination,” “discredited,” “sparring session,” and “a certain innate intelligence.” He tossed off well-turned sentences such as, “It could have been a contentious route,” and, “These are the only casinos in the United States that are so rated.” He even offered thoughtful, articulate aphorisms: “If you get into what’s missing, you don’t appreciate what you have,” and, “Adversity is a very funny thing.”
A New York Times analysis of how much more Trump has been talking in his second term found that as of January 20th 2026, Trump has spoken one million nine hundred and seventy-seven thousand six hundred and nine words in Presidential appearances—an increase of 245% compared with Trump’s first year in office back in 2017.
It’s a good time to bring out this column’s favorite insight into Donald Trump, courtesy of the Times’ Maggie Haberman.
Mr. Trump has treated his own words as disposable commodities, intended for single use, and not necessarily indicative of any deeply held beliefs.
Or his understanding.