Trump Deemed ‘Agonizing’ In His ‘Slow Talking’ Record-Breaking Performance, Rendering Audience ‘Miserable’
If people appeared to look somewhat “miserable” to you in the audience during Donald Trump’s first State of the Union Address, there is a reason for this claims a new report. The stats are in and Trump has managed to beat all the past presidents for an honor he may not want. Trump is now at the top of the list for his “slow talking” State of the Union Address, which was described as “agonizing” by The Cut.
The stats on how Trump compared to previous presidents during their State of the Union Address were revealed in a report from the Business Insider this weekend. Among all the presidents this nation has had in the last 50 years or so, Donald Trump was deemed as the slowest talker while delivering his address.
Stats on words per minute offered in a State of the Union Address have been tracked for about a half of a century, according to the Business Insider. At 72 words per minute, this makes Trump’s 5,800-word address the slowest-delivered in the past 50 years. Trump’s speech came in the third longest for the amount of time taken at 1:20:45, with Bill Clinton taking both first and second place in this category. Two of Clinton’s State of the Union Addresses lasted longer than Trump’s first go at it. Clinton came in first and second place for the longest time in the year 1995 and the year 2000, according to the Business Insider.
Trump was the slowest speaker during a SOTU speech among the past president’s averages, beating out the next slowest speaker, who was Lyndon Johnson. Trump came in at 72 words per minute, which is 20 words less per minute than former President Johnson’s average. Since this is Trump’s first speech he has a chance to up that average with feasibly delivering seven more State of the Union Addresses if he is elected for a second term. The past presidents’ stats are based on four or eight speeches, which coincide with the number of years they were in office.
The fastest speaker for a State of the Union Address was Richard Nixon, who spewed off 128.21 words per minute, according to the average of his stats. Ronald Reagan with a 114.9 word-per-minute average came in second after Nixon. Both father and son Bush Presidents and Bill Clinton spoke at an average rate of under 100 words per minute, a group that Donald Trump has now joined in the State of the Union Address stats history.
President Obama spoke at a rate of 109.3 words per minute in his average for the State of the Union Address, putting him third on the list for the fastest president behind Nixon and Reagan. The stats are collected and tracked by The American Presidency Project out of the University of California in Santa Barbara.
The number of words that each president spoke in their State of the Union Address is averaged among the number of times they’ve delivered the speech. This has been tracked since the “Father of the Country” was in office, George Washington. He averaged 2080 words in his for the SOTU over the eight speeches he gave for that venue.
According to The Business Insider, the average word length of these speeches for this address has gone down over the past few years. But if you look at the stats listed for President James Polk, his word length was 18,014. Quite a few of the old timers had an average going over 10,000 words in their State of the Union Addresses including Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan.
The stats indicate that since the day of Woodrow Wilson, the length of the State of the Union Addresses has been kept under a 9,000-word average.
