“Burn Down Washington”

Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance wrote the foreword for a new book by Kevin Roberts, Dawn’s Early Light, scheduled for release in September.

Roberts is president of the Heritage Foundation, the organization behind Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, which lays out a vision for a Trump presidency (he’s named more than 300 times) that would eliminate abortion and gay rights and dismantle the Department of Education, just for starters. It also calls for banning pornography, which it equates with any mention of trans gender identity.

Vance says the Heritage Foundation is “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” He calls for “an offensive conservatism” and quotes Roberts’ call for action: “When the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.” He’s so enamored of the passage that he repeats it: “We are now all realizing that it is time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

I have not gotten my hands on an advance copy of Roberts’ book, so I can only tell you what’s in the promotional materials. And that is an interesting story. A weird story, even. The subtitle of the book, as announced by HarperCollins, is “Taking Back Washington to Save America.”

But when Vance first took to X to laud the “incredible” book’s “bold new vision,” it was subtitled “Burning Down Washington to Save America.

Two days later, Vance deleted that, and posted a new tweet: same text, new title, no match in the cover photo.

Apparently whoever updated HarperCollins’ web page for the book forgot to change the title and description associated with the audiobook. Over at Amazon, the title given for the hardcover and the ebook has “taking,” while the CD version use “burning.” Amazon’s audiobook also gives the title as “burning,” but the description of the book is yet another different version.

Amazon’s description for the hardcover and ebook mirror HarperCollins’ copy for the book. Amazon’s audiobook description has the same sentence structures and paragraph breaks, with some word changes. Both versions claim that “a corrupt and incompetent elite” is brainwashing the nation, and call Roberts’ book “ambitious and provocative.” Then they diverge.

In HarperCollins’ current book description, Roberts’ book “blazes a promising path” for conservative change. On Amazon’s audiobook page, the book “blazes a warpath.” The FBI, Ivy League universities, the Gates Foundation, and the New York Times are “too corrrupt to save.” HarperCollins: “All these need to be dissolved.” Amazon: “Conservatives need to burn down these institutions.”

The copy on the Amazon page for the CD version of the book — and, as of this writing, on HarperCollins’ website for the audiobook — is yet more extreme. I took the screenshot at 11:15 pm on July 30 and am reproducing it as there is no knowing when HarperCollins might change the website.

In this version, Democrats and Republicans alike belong to a “Uniparty” aligned with “globalist elites” that promote centralized government and “endless wars.” (Real Americans, on the other hand, “prioritize winning wars worth fighting.” Which wars are which?) The list of institutions to be “destroyed” includes the Boy Scouts, the Fairfax County School System, and the World Economic Forum.

By “globalist elites,” right-wing conspiracy theorists mean the secret worldwide Jewish cabal that, in their fevered imaginations, controls multinational corporations and international finance. Some of them think the entire cabal consists of George Soros. Some dream up space lasers. The fantasy of malicious and powerful Jews is hundreds of years old. It was peddled by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford, and Adolf Hitler. White nationalists just keep breathing new life into it.

But where do these different descriptions of the book originate? The publishers of both of my books asked for marketing descriptions of various lengths when preparing the contract. What I wrote for the first book, and my co-author and I, for the second, later appeared on the publishers’ websites and on Amazon.

It is quite likely that the title and language that still linger on HarperCollins’ digital audio page and on Amazon’s page for the audio CD represent Roberts’ original vision for the book, but when Trump tapped Vance as his VP, somebody at HarperCollins got nervous.

In an excerpt from Roberts’ book published online by the Institute on Public and Religious life under the title “Burning down Washington,” Roberts writes that patriarchy is “the natural form of familial relations.”   In the “Foreword” to the Project 2025 Mandate, he calls government “unnatural” (4) and urges the next president to delete references in all federal documents to “gender, gender equality, gender equity … abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights” (5).

I think what he is attempting here is to claim that contraception and gender equality restrict his free exercise of religion. But his slash-and-burn method denies other people freedom of religion and freedom of speech. In labeling patriarchy as “natural,” he tries to delegitimize any other perspective. It’s kind of impressive, rhetorically, but still ugly.

These are the ideas that vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance lauds in his introduction to Roberts’ book, for which he was “thrilled” to write the Foreword, and which he says is “an essential weapon” in the battle that he wants to provoke. Censorship. A sweeping denial of basic civil rights to gay and trans people. Loading his gun to fight. Burning universities, newspapers, charitable foundations, federal offices, and the boy scouts. The boy scouts?

I used to think Trump was the country’s most dangerous politician. I have begun to think that Vance might be more dangerous. 

 

Biden’s Cognitive State: Stable

I decided I should run numbers for Biden, as I did yesterday for Trump. As in analyzing Trump’s language, I used a speech from the 1980s as a baseline before looking at more recent speeches.

In the absence of complete medical reports, the quality of their speech provides perhaps the best proxy for evaluating both men’s cognitive state. In transcripts of their speeches, sentence complexity drops with age for both. Trump averaged 20 words per sentence in a 1980 interview; Biden averaged 18.7 words per sentence in a presidental campaign speech in 1987. Biden’s baseline grade level is 12.9, Trump’s 10.5.

Jumping ahead several decades, both men’s speeech demonstrates decreased complexity, as measured by sentence length, vocabulary, and other metrics.

But unlike Trump’s, Biden’s speech patterns have remained stable in recent years.

In three randomly chosen speeches from the past five years, Biden’s data are comparable. Average sentence lengths of speeches from 2019, 2021, and 2024 are 13, 16.6, and 14.2, while grade-level calculations come in at 9.5, 9.2, and 9.6.

Right-wing Republicans have asserted since before his presidency that Biden is mentally unfit for the office. In 2021, Lauren Bobert tweeted that cognitive decline made him a security risk. Moderate Republicans, however, found him sharp, well prepared, and cogent in discussions of policy and legislation.

The contrast is clear: unlike Biden’s, the complexity of Trump’s speech continues to drop.

Trump’s confident pugnacity has not changed.

But his speeches, and the thought processes they reveal, indicate that he is increasingly unable to grapple with complicated ideas and delicate negotiations. Even in comparison to 2017, the idea of Trump representing the United States in interactions with global heads of state is … unsettling.

Democrats have focused, appropriately, on Trump’s policy proposals and his extremist rhetoric, rather than descending to personal attacks. 

But the evidence of dwindling cognitive capacity and agility afforded by Trump’s speeches is hard to ignore. Americans across the political spectrum should worry, a lot, about his ability to govern.

Trump’s Cognitive Decline is Obvious

Words. Words are what I know how to do things with. So I decided to do some things with words. And I have to tell you, I was really surprised and dismayed by what I learned.

Claims are flying that Presiden Biden is incompetent, not fit to finish his term, much less serve for another four years. But what of former president Trump? He’s been called a danger to democracy, unfit to rule — but on account of his character, but not his cognitive state.

I got curious. I pulled an interview Trump gave in 1980 as a baseline, and I compared that with two speeches and an interview from the past decade: 

• October, 1980, interview with Rona Barrett
• October, 2017, speech at the Heritage Foundation
• April, 2023 interview with Time Magazine
• July, 2024 speech at the Republican National Convention

Speech analysis provides a good window into cognition. More sophisticated speakers use a wide vocabulary and complex sentence structures that reflect depth, breadth, and subtlety in thought. Cognitive decline is accompanied by a decrease in these metrics, pointing to shrinking capacity for attention to complicated issues. Like, for example, international politics.

For the purpose of this analysis, I used online text analysis tools that count the number of words in each sentence, as well as the number of unique words in each passage. As a proxy for word complexity, they calculate the average number letters and syllables per word, and compare words used against a list known to most fourth graders in a study done in 1984.

They crunch the numbers using several different formulas, whose results are usually expressed as a number corresponding to a grade level. If the text is assigned a 10, it means the average tenth grader will understand it easily.

I pasted excerpts from each of Trump’s speeches and interviews into two different online text analysis tools (in case programming details produced different results; they didn’t), and I averaged the results produced by four formulas.

In the 1980 interview, Trump spoke at a grade level of 10.5, averaging 20 words per sentence. In the 2017 speech, this went down to grade 9, and 12.5 words per sentence. Sentence length in the 2023 interview was comparable at 12.9, but the grade level slipped again, to 7.4.

In his convention speech this month, Trump averaged 9.4 words per sentence at a grade level of 5.9.

For context and comparison, in a 2023 speech at Fisk University, Vice President Harris averaged 23.5 words per sentence and spoke at a grade level of 11.3. In his comments on the RNC shooting, President Biden used 14 words per sentence on average, at a grade level of 10.8.

Given the evidence of Trump’s speech over the years, he is clearly unfit to serve another term as president, not only on grounds of the threat he and his associates pose to democracy, but also because of the decline in his cognitive abilities.