LogFAQs > #975395687

George W. Bush on both counts, and by a lot.

Bush was a pretty good public speaker, as long as he stayed on script. It was when he was speaking off the cuff or going off script that he had his famous verbal gaffes.

And even then, it usually was just inelegant wording and it wasn't hard to figure out what he actually meant. When he said something dumb like, "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family," or, "Rarely is the question asked, 'Is our children learning?'", you clearly knew what he was trying to say.

Now I'm not going to say Bush was the brightest dude to ever be president, but Trump was almost certainly the dumbest, and it showed. His speaking was not only tortured stream-of-consciousness verbal blather, it frequently was just... really, really dumb. It wasn't even that he meant to say something understandable but flubbed it - he was trying to say something stupid and said it stupidly.

I mean, how do you defend something like: "Look, having nuclear my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart you know, if youre a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say Im one of the smartest people anywhere in the world its true! but when youre a conservative Republican they try oh, do they do a number thats why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because were a little disadvantaged but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me it would have been so easy, and its not as important as these lives are nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of whats going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? but when you look at whats going on with the four prisoners now it used to be three, now its four but when it was three and even now, I would have said its all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they dont, they havent figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, its gonna take them about another 150 years but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible." (Donald Trump, 2016)

Or: "My father is German, right? Was German, and born in a very wonderful place in Germany, so I have a great feeling for Germany." (Donald Trump, whose father, Fred Trump, was born in the US and lived there his entire life, 2019).

Or: "Well look, Brian, you have forests all over the world. You dont have fires like you do in California, you know. In Europe, they have forest cities. You look at you look at countries Austria. You look at so many countries, they live in the forest. Theyre considered forest cities so many of them. And they dont have fires like this and they have more explosive trees. They have trees that will catch easier. But they maintain their fire. They have an expression, they thin the fuel. The fuel is whats on the ground the leaves." (Donald Trump, 2020)

Or: "If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 per cent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, OK?" (Donald Trump, 2019)

About the only thing that Trump did better than Bush on the public speaking front is he was better at energizing crowds. That's about it.