…A Hazy Shade of Winter…

You know the drill. Headline first. Then a march through the methodology. If you want single-serving factoids, go to, well, pretty much anywhere else on the Internet.

Donald Trump arrives in the office almost an hour later than any President since 1933. His average arrival time is 10:42 am for his Presidency, and 11:18 a.m. for 2018. He spends the least amount of time in the office as well, though under 8 hours of office time is a trait shared with 5 of the past 13 presidents.

This is based on an analysis of daily presidential calendars from March 4, 1933 through December 31, 2018, and covered 83,229  pages of records.

View Methodology   View Data

So to answer the several dozen questions we’ve received on this topic: you’re not imagining it. But, like all things in life, it’s not so cut and dry.

Hang onto your hopes my friend.

So this question has been asked a few times. But who on earth has time to rummage through a dozen presidential libraries? Apparently, we do.

At the Fact Cave, one of our more popular features is Donald Trump’s daily schedule. We’ve beefed it up of late. You can find monthly stats embedded, miles traveled, record counts, time on camera. Look for the plus sign in the Month bar.

But no good deed goes unpunished. We’ve been asked whether it appeared that Donald Trump was coming to the office later in the day, particularly after his busy election season. We did a quick check. But it’s the holiday season in D.C, which like August, tends to be a “what, me work?” kind of month, even for Presidents, and certainly in D.C., whether or not it’s shut down.

But the question started taking a life of its own on December 13th…

Trump is not in the West Wing yet this morning, NBC's Hans Nichols just reported on @MSNBC. The Marine guard is not posted out there.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 13, 2018

The volume of questions picked up. So we started digging in and, lo and behold, it looked like there were some interesting patterns in Trump’s schedule. But without a cohort, there’s no way to tell if it was a normal pattern. Which leads to our favorite word: cohort.

It’s bound to be a better ride.

So, much like how Factba.se started, we sometimes jump first, then find out if there’s water in the pool. So, really, how many pages could a Presidential schedule be?

83,229 pages since Roosevelt, in a dozen different presidential libraries. 67,173 of those pages scans of typewritten logs. 13,905 of them handwritten (in fairness to LBJ, some were typed… but not a lot).

Sure. We were so glad we decided to try this. Around the holidays. Shoot me.

Luckily, it’s good to be friends with an AI that has read about 1.2 million pages of government PDFs in her life. Especially when you helped program her. And pay her AWS bills. So really, other than some truly awful scans, we could pull the vast majority of the data.

…Drinking my vodka…

Seriously? No More Simon & Garfunkel Quotes

You want the blog post, or do you just want to complain about my wandering non sequiturs? Actually, I was thinking of The Bangles version from 1987 (though they played it live as early as 1983). Though nothing but love to Simon & Garfunkel.

On with it…

Data Collection

We were able to locate the schedule of nearly every President from Roosevelt forward, or enough portions to be statistically valid. Only the George H.W. Bush Library doesn’t have either the Daily Guidance or the Daily Diary available online. We had to take what we could get from the National Archives. The George W. Bush Library has the schedule for 338 of his 2,922 days… not ideal, but enough for a good statistical sample. We’re noticing a familial pattern here on data availability.

The Pare Lorenz Center at the FDR Presidential Library and the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum had blessedly recreated the daily schedule in text, sparing us spelunking via OCR to get the data. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum was a hot mess, but we pieced together PDFs for 835 of his 1,036 days as President. And the administration of Barack Obama earns a frown for only having 2,384 of the 2,922 days up. We are confident the Internet existed in 2009. Come on, people.

Because this was a lot, we were going for a statistically valid sample, not perfection (we made that mistake initially and burned two days… story for another time). So we unleashed Margaret. For 31,348 days since March 4, 1933, we had data on 26,564 of them. We ended up eliminating some days for vacation (no start or end appointments), others because the data was missing, and some if Margaret just said “hey, I’m not sure about this day.” We were working with half-century old documents in some cases.

In the end, we ended up with 20,905 days of schedules. That works out to 77.49% of the days with data, or 66.69% of the whole. I think my statistics professor would say that’s a valid sample.

Not All Schedules Are Created Equal

As with any historical data, you work with what you have. So it’s important to understand the two different types.

Daily Guidance
The “Daily Guidance” or “Daily Schedule“. This is what we have for Trump, Obama and Clinton, and it appears to be the level of depth for what we have for Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in that it’s very high level and doesn’t tend to go into breakfasts, dinners and 3-5 minute meetings. It’s the high-level items. For Clinton/Obama/Trump, this is the schedule published to the members of the media. This will sometimes include appointments that were canceled… not often, but it does happen. It also reflects what was scheduled… not the time things actually occurred.

And perhaps most important. It is intended for public consumption at the time it was issued.

Daily Diary
The “Daily Diary” we have for nearly everyone else is the log kept by the Presidential Office of Appointments and Scheduling. It is an exact record of what actually happened. In addition, since it is meant for posterity, and can be redacted for security, it is a far more detailed account of the day and will include things that may not have been in the public schedule. Also, these usually aren’t released for a couple of decades, if at all.

The level of detail can also vary. Roosevelt’s daily schedule includes notes from his stenographer, the White House usher, and his personal appointment diary. Reagan’s includes his personal diary entries as well as the official log.

What does this mean? When looking at the office hours, some entries are more detailed, and thus cover more time. Truman’s diary doesn’t have a lot of records once he “left the office,” so to speak, where Roosevelt’s details who he drank and smoked with at midnight. The chart above groups the hours by who had what type of data available.

More details in the methodology at the bottom.

Okay, What Did You Find?

First, we were able to validate what our readers had emailed and tweeted about. Trump starts his day later in the office than any other President since 1933. That’s definitive, regardless of schedule type. For his presidency, his average first scheduled appointment is 10:42 a.m. This is 47 minutes later than the next closest average start time, which belongs to Harry Truman.

With 2018 wrapping up, his yearly average start time for 2018 is now 11:18 a.m. This is the latest average yearly start time since 1933, and 1 hour, 1 minute later than the runner-up, 1948 (Truman). No other president had a year where their first public appointment started after 11 a.m.

Of interest: for those presidents elected to their first term (FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush… no data for either Bush 41 or Obama), most were consistent in arrival time between years, ranging from 19 minutes earlier between the first two years (FDR) to 32 minutes later (Carter… from 6:38 a.m. average time to 7:10 a.m.). Trump’s first public appointment moved 74 minutes, from 10:04 a.m. in 2017 to 11:18 a.m. in 2018. No one else had a shift that large.

Trump also has the shortest day, in terms of the time between his first and last appointments. His average scheduled time, as published, is 6 hours, 26 minutes. This is less than half the average time logged by George H. W. Bush (see below), Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter, who had a more detailed schedule. But even within the sub-cohort, it was the least amount of scheduled time, on average, followed closely by Harry Truman.

George H. W. Studmuffin

Yes, Bush 41 stands out, but he comes with a large footnote, and not just for his super-sized scheduling.

The Bush 41 Library has not yet gotten around to publishing the entire Daily Diary to the Intertubes yet. It’s the only Presidential library that doesn’t have at least a partial, if not complete, set of schedules. The National Archives happens to have 41 (get it?) very complete schedules for two days in 1990 and 39 in 1991. It’s not enough to do a monthly/yearly, but it at least gives us an idea of his schedule. [Update 12/31 @ 6:55 pm ET. Thank you for the tip on the Web Archive! Now at 414 days for Bush. ]

And the man, in those 41 days, he started between 5 and 6 am on 30 of those days. He’s got one all-nighter in the set of schedules. I’m fairly certain there was a whole section in there where he caught up with Clint Eastwood, got drunk on rye, then proceeded to beat the crap out of Ivan Drago while Eastwood glowered. And he was still up at 5 the next morning for breakfast and phone calls.

Suffice it to say, without any editorializing, day-um.

But also suffice it to say: we were comfortable including it in the overall average only, given it is 41 days. The schedule has a regularity to it missing from all the other schedules. He was a man of routines. But it is still based on 41 days from the National Archives out of his 1,461 days in office. So take the data with appropriate caution. [Update 12/31 @ 6:55 pm ET: now 414 records, revising average start to 7:50 am and average last item at 10:44 p.m., just shy of 15 hours on average per day.]

What About Twitter?

That’s an absolutely fair point. Trump is known to be awake at all hours tweeting on @realDonald Trump. We’ve even included the distribution data so you can see for yourself.

But here’s the thing: is it actually Trump tweeting? We can work off lots of different types of data. In looking at first/last tweets every day for an indication of schedule, it literally spans 24 hours on @realDonaldTrump. Of 710 days checked, on a midnight->midnight basis, 260 of those days had their first tweet between midnight and 5 a.m. (36.6%). If we arbitrarily assume 5 a.m. is a starting point, then the last tweet of the day occurred between 12-5 a.m. 275 times or 38.7% of the time.

But was it him? Or Dan Scavino? Or someone from the social media team? Or the press office?

We have a bot that uses as reference data tweets from when he was the only one on his team using an Android to tweet, and everyone else used an iPhone. Using thousands of those tweets, our model is able to predict, with 91% accuracy, if he tweeted something, or if his staff tweeted something, based on the language, use of hashtags and images, and so forth (hint: he rarely uses hashtags or images, but his staff uses CAPITAL LETTERS in almost equal proportions when using the account).

It’s not bad, but not perfect. But using that as a reference, our bots say 54% of those midnight-5 a.m. tweets are staff. That’s way too high a number to assume it’s Trump thumbing the tweet.

Take a look at the data for yourself and see if you can make better heads or tails of it. But for the purposes of this exercise, until a more detailed calendar is available, we’re leaving Twitter out of this, because if we use @realDonaldTrump as a guide to the beginning or end of the day, we’d have to ask if Trump has ever slept. Ever.

So What Does This All Mean?

We can pretty safely say he’s not a morning person, at least as far as his official calendar goes. And we no more think Trump leaves the office at 5:18 p.m. with nary a thought about his job than we think three-hour gaps in the middle George H.W. Bush’s schedule meant he was refining his knife-fighting skills.

What we can say, pretty definitively, is his official calendar starts later than any time since 1933 by a wide margin. His last meeting isn’t the earliest… that belongs to Eisenhower (3:47 p.m.). But what we basically did is answer the question: is he getting to the office later? The answer: yes.

Also, we now regret never watching Bush 41 arm wrestle Stallone.

So now, the data, methodology, and notes.

We have the data in a handy Google Sheet .  It includes the monthly and yearly data for each President and their schedule, along with the original raw data. It also includes the twitter data referenced above. A summary is below.

President	1st Mtg	Last Mtg	# Days	Duration
FDR	8:49 AM	8:29 PM	3873	11:40:00
Truman	9:55 AM	4:38 PM	2003	6:43:00
Ike	8:35 AM	3:47 PM	2378	7:12:00
JFK	9:29 AM	4:45 PM	528	7:16:00
LBJ	9:03 AM	7:54 PM	852	10:51:00
Nixon	8:57 AM	8:19 PM	1201	11:22:00
Ford	8:02 AM	9:34 PM	787	13:32:00
Carter	7:00 AM	8:21 PM	1455	13:21:00
Reagan	8:41 AM	8:47 PM	2446	12:06:00
Bush 41	5:47 AM	9:41 PM	41	15:54:00
Clinton	8:19 AM	6:23 PM	2511	10:04:00
Bush 43	7:48 AM	5:26 PM	324	9:38:00
Obama	9:42 AM	4:54 PM	1550	7:12:00
Trump	10:42 AM	5:08 PM	577	6:26:00

View or Download All the Data in a Google Sheet

 

• Time Zones. All times are adjusted to local time, based on where the President was at that particular time, so first and last meetings are based on where the president was on that day/time vs. Eastern time.
• Missing / Incomplete Data.
  • Days with no public schedule or diary, either due to redaction or vacation where no data was available, were excluded from the calculations.
  • In cases where the Factba.se platform could not discern a time or date automatically with a high degree of accuracy, the day in question was excluded from the calculation. The percent coverage is noted below.
• 11:59 pm. For simplification, any day that ended after 11:59 pm was rounded to 11:59 pm in the evening. So if the last item on the schedule was 1:15 am, it was calculated at 11:59 pm for the purposes of the analysis.
• Weekends. For Donald Trump, M-F calculations are used, but both M-F and full 7-day averages are available on the Trump 45 Tab. All other Presidents were analyzed using all days, including weekends and holidays.

Sources

• Franklin D. Roosevelt
  • Pare Lorenz Center at the FDR Presidential Library
  • Presidency: 4,442 days; In Analysis: 3,783 days (87.58%)
  • Type: Daily Diary (Detailed)
• Harry S. Truman
  • Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum
  • Presidency: 2,840 days; In Analysis: 2,003 days (70.53%)
  • Type: Daily Schedule (Public Meetings)
  • Note: The schedule was partial and filled in based on news reports by the Library. As a result, a number of days have records that just list an evening speech. These were filtered out as they were not part of the official record.
• Dwight D. Eisenhower
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home
  • Presidency: 2,922 days; In Analysis: 2,378 days (81.38%)
  • Type: Daily Schedule (Public Meetings)
• John F. Kennedy
  • John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
  • Presidency: 1,036 days; In Analysis: 528 days (50.97%)
  • Type: Daily Schedule (Public Meetings)
• Lyndon B. Johnson
  • LBJ Presidential Library
  • Presidency: 1,886 days; In Analysis: 852 days (45.17%)
  • Type: Daily Diary (Detailed)
  • Note: The majority of this schedule was handwritten. Most days not included were due to inaccurate data from the conversion of 50-year-old cursive to text.
• Richard M. Nixon
  • Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
  • Presidency: 2,027 days; In Analysis: 1,201 days (59.25%)
  • Type: Daily Diary (Detailed)
• Gerald Ford
  • Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum
  • Presidency: 895 days; In Analysis: 787 days (87.93%)
  • Type: Daily Diary (Detailed)
• Jimmy Carter
  • The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum
  • Presidency: 1,461 days; In Analysis: 1,455 days (99.59%)
  • Type: Daily Diary (Detailed)
• Ronald Reagan
  • Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum
  • Presidency: 2,922 days; In Analysis: 2,446 days (83.71%)
  • Type: Daily Diary (Detailed)
• George H. W. Bush
  • Not available on the George H.W. Bush Library Center online archives. (Boo!)
  • Limited data used from the National Archives (41 records)
  • Miller Center has 373 records they removed, but still available on the Wayback Machine
  • Presidency: 1,461 days; In Analysis: 414 days (28.34%)
  • Type: Daily Diary (Detailed)
  • Note: The small sample size means this should be used as a guide, or approximation.
• Bill Clinton
  • Clinton Digital Library
  • Presidency: 2,922 days; In Analysis: 2,511 days (85.93%)
  • Type: Daily Schedule (Public Meetings)
• George W. Bush
  • George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum
  • Presidency: 2,922 days; In Analysis: 324 days (11.09%)
  • Type: Daily Diary (Detailed)
  • Note: Only 338 days total were made public so far by the George W. Bush Presidential Library. A FOIA request for the records has been filed, with an estimated completion of January 2021 (for real).
• Barack Obama
  • The White House: President Barack Obama Archive
  • Presidency: 2,922 days; In Analysis: 1,550 days (53.05%)
  • Type: Daily Schedule (Public Meetings)
  • Note: The Obama White House did not start publishing his daily schedule until July, 2010. In addition, there are numerous gaps in the schedule on their public blog.
• Donald Trump
  • Factba.se, as compiled from the White House Press Office Daily Guidance emails, Pool Reports, and @POTUS_Schedule on Twitter
  • Presidency: 710 days; In Analysis: 583 days (82.11%)
  • Type: Daily Schedule (Public Meetings)
• Donald Trump (Tweets)
  • Tweets Via Twitter, including deleted tweets. Times adjusted based on schedule

 

Update 1/2/19

Happy New Year! By request, here’s the same data (using the 7-day per week vs M-F) by month just for Donald Trump.

So what is a Federal Government shutdown? Well, for starters, it’s not a shutdown.

It’s the result of the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act. Among other things, it required that Congress must authorize funding for the federal government. This is something, in the 44 years since it has passed, it has failed to do on time in 36.4% of the budget cycles, or 16 of the past 44 years The shutdowns of Jan/Feb 2018 were related to the 2017 budget cycle, and are counted as such.. With continuing resolutions in the same cycle, it has happened 22 times.

This did not always mean a shutdown. The first six times this happened, it was business as usual. A series of opinions issued by then-Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti in 1980 and 1981 established that, if a funding gap exists, the agency or agencies impacted must shut down. This, in turn, was his interpretation of the 1884 Antideficiency Act.

The first time any agency was shut down as a result was during the 18-hour shutdown of the FTC on May 1, 1980.

Funding gaps result in shutdowns only when those agencies are without Congressionally-approved funding. Essential services, like the Department of Defense, are largely unaffected.

Of note:

• The longest shutdown: December 22, 2018 – January 25, 2019 at 9 pm ET, under Donald Trump. [Update: Added January 12, 2018]
• The longest shutdown: December 16, 1995 – January 6, 1996 under Bill Clinton.
• The shortest shutdown: February 9, 2018 for about nine hours, under Donald Trump.
• The only two presidents who had an actual partial or full shutdown while the same party controlled the executive and legislative branches? Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump.

U.S. Federal Government Funding Gaps

Sequence	Start	End	Duration (Hours)	President	Senate	House	Link
22	Dec 22 '18 12:00 AM	Jan 25 '19 9:00 PM	825.0035 days, 21 hours, 0 minutes	Donald Trump (R)	51-49 (R)	236-197 (R)
21	Feb 9 '18 12:00 AM	Feb 9 '18 9:00 AM	9.002 days, 23 hours, 5 minutes	Donald Trump (R)	51-49 (R)	236-197 (R)
20	Jan 20 '18 12:00 AM	Jan 22 '18 11:05 PM	71.082 days, 23 hours, 5 minutes	Donald Trump (R)	51-49 (R)	236-197 (R)
19	Oct 1 '13 12:00 AM	Oct 17 '13 12:30 AM	384.5016 days, 0 hours, 30 minutes	Barack Obama (D)	54-46 (D)	232-200 (R)
18	Dec 16 '95 12:00 AM	Jan 6 '96 12:05 AM	504.0821 days, 0 hours, 5 minutes	Bill Clinton (D)	53-47 (R)	235-198 (R)
17	Nov 13 '95 12:00 AM	Nov 19 '95 6:40 PM	162.676 days, 18 hours, 40 minutes	Bill Clinton (D)	53-47 (R)	233-199 (R)
16	Oct 5 '90 12:00 AM	Oct 10 '90 1:30 AM	121.505 days, 1 hour, 30 minutes	George H. W. Bush (R)	55-45 (D)	258-176 (D)
15	Dec 18 '87 12:00 AM	Dec 20 '87 8:00 PM	68.002 days, 20 hours	Ronald Reagan (R)	54-46 (D)	258-177 (D)
14	Oct 16 '86 12:00 AM	Oct 19 '86 1:30 AM	73.503 days, 1 hour, 30 minutes	Ronald Reagan (R)	53-47 (R)	253-182 (D)
13	Oct 3 '84 12:00 AM	Oct 5 '84 5:00 PM	65.002 days, 17 hours	Ronald Reagan (R)	55-45 (R)	270-165 (D)
12	Sep 30 '84 12:00 AM	Oct 3 '84 12:00 PM	84.003 days, 12 hours	Ronald Reagan (R)	55-45 (R)	270-165 (D)
11	Nov 10 '83 12:00 AM	Nov 14 '83 12:00 AM	96.004 days	Ronald Reagan (R)	55-45 (R)	271-164 (D)
10	Dec 17 '82 12:00 AM	Dec 21 '82 12:10 AM	96.174 days, 0 hours, 10 minutes	Ronald Reagan (R)	53-47 (R)	244-191 (D)
9	Sep 30 '82 12:00 AM	Oct 2 '82 10:00 PM	70.002 days, 22 hours	Ronald Reagan (R)	53-47 (R)	244-191 (D)
8	Nov 20 '81 12:00 AM	Nov 23 '81 6:38 PM	90.633 days, 18 hours, 38 minutes	Ronald Reagan (R)	53-47 (R)	244-191 (D)
7	May 1 '80 12:00 AM	May 1 '80 6:00 PM	18.0018 hours	Jimmy Carter (D)	58-42 (D)	277-158 (D)
6	Sep 30 '79 12:00 AM	Oct 12 '79 8:00 PM	308.0012 days, 20 hours	Jimmy Carter (D)	58-42 (D)	277-158 (D)
5	Sep 30 '78 12:00 AM	Oct 18 '78 12:00 AM	432.0018 days	Jimmy Carter (D)	59-41 (D)	292-143 (D)
4	Nov 30 '77 12:00 AM	Dec 9 '77 12:00 AM	216.009 days	Jimmy Carter (D)	59-41 (D)	292-143 (D)
3	Oct 31 '77 12:00 AM	Nov 9 '77 12:00 AM	216.009 days	Jimmy Carter (D)	59-41 (D)	292-143 (D)
2	Sep 30 '77 12:00 AM	Oct 13 '77 12:00 AM	312.0013 days	Gerald Ford (R)	59-41 (D)	292-143 (D)
1	Sep 30 '76 12:00 AM	Oct 11 '76 11:59 PM	288.0012 days	Gerald Ford (R)	62-38 (D)	291-144 (D)

 

Editor’s Note: We incorrectly initially listed the 1995 shutdown as beginning on December 5th, 1995. It began December 16, 1995. We regret this error.

 

[Note: The data has been updated as of October 3, 2019. Latest: Not “Stable Genius” Again, Or Please Stop Making Us Run This Analysis]

So, as always. First the headline, then you need to eat your vegetables to get the details.

The headline:

By any metric to measure vocabulary, using more than a half dozen tests with different methodologies, Donald Trump has the most basic, most simplistically constructed, least diverse vocabulary of any President in the last 90 years. This is by a statistically significant margin in each case.

Okay, the headline’s out of the way. On to the vegetables, so you understand why we checked this, and the methodology.

(And with our apologies for the simplistic charts. The Google Sheets plug in is quick and dirty… but the data’s all there for you at the bottom)

Why Are You Blogging on a Sunday Night?

Well, the Golden Globes are on. Also…

I usually try to unplug over the weekend. And by unplug, I mean “catch up on everything I was supposed to do during the week but didn’t because who the hell can get work done during office hours.” You know, by relaxing and stuff.

So the emails that started coming in Saturday morning around 8 a.m. kind of interfered with that plan. I ignored them for all of 20 seconds before seeing what the heck was going on. In general, when something is going on, the emails tend to clump together. The phone wasn’t going to stop vibrating by force of will alone.

Turned out, it was a number of folks asking if I’d seen the “genius” tweet, and if Factba.se had ever run an intelligence test.

Now, when someone emails me at an ungodly hour (and prior to 11 am on a weekend more than qualifies, given my normal bedtime is defined as “Thursday”) to ask about a tweet, I put the darker thoughts out of my mind and did my best not to get upset.

But I was awake. May as well spoil it. The tweet in question (a three-parter, which is more unusual of late since the character limit was upped):

Now that Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the Fake News Mainstream Media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

….Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

….to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

…spanning 11 minutes. (Sorry about that last one… one of my favorite Road Runners).

The quote that seemed to stick out in everyone’s mind was the last one: “I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!”

Okay, I was awake.

Apparently, the intellectual exercise would be to parse the phrase “genius” and could it be proven, or disproven.

Into the Den of Snopes

Measuring intelligence is normally done through a simple method with no agreed upon standard: an IQ test, a loosely-defined standardized test, variations of which have been in use for more than a century. The most common one in modern use is the the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) v4, in use since 2008.

However, there is no peer-reviewed method to look at writing / speeches / etc to assess intelligence. The closest is a 2006 study, which used a historiometric method.

Suffice it to say, that method is fine, but it takes a doctorate and an expert. We don’t have presidential scholars at Factba.se. We’re a bunch of data schmoos. Also, this particular study was ripped off and faked enough in the past 15 years that it has multiple snopes pages (here, here, and here) and it rates its own Wikipedia page. Again, the study is fine. Making stuff up around it isn’t.

Supercalifragilisticvocabularydocious

However, the ability to measure the complexity of vocabulary, the diversity and its comprehension level is something we do all the time here in the Fact Cave, courtesy of Margaret, our platform’s AI. In fact, it’s done every time we add a word into the platform, automagically. The most common metric, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, was actually developed for the military in the 1970s as a way to check that training materials were appropriate and could be understood by its personnel. It is used as a measurement in legislation to ensure documents such as insurance policies can be understood.

There are a number of competing algorithms. They use different approaches, but all try to do one of two things:

• Grade Level. Establish the grade level at which the text could be understood
• Reading Ease. Essentially the same thing, but with a normalized statistical score vs. a U.S.-centric grade level.

At Factba.se, Margaret runs every single bit of text automatically through the following algorithms:

• Flesch Kincaid: Grade Level
• Flesch Kincaid: Reading Ease
• Gunning Fog Index
• Coleman-Liau Index
• SMOG Index
• Automaed Readability Index
• Dale-Chall Readability Score
• Spache Readability Formula

… and about a dozen others, including difficult word count, etc. We’re also testing the Lexile Framework.

As a side benefit, recreationally, we built a database of interviews, speeches and press conferences for previous presidents, leaning heavily on what’s available publicly from presidential libraries, and the wonderful collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project. One of the reasons we did this is to provide a point of contrast. Looking at a single datapoint can tell you everything and nothing. A nice cohort comparison… that’s better.

Importantly, as we’ve blogged earlier, we like to focus on a person’s own words if possible, not speechwriters. The UCSB archive in particular gave us a rich trove of Presidential press conferences back to Herbert Hoover in 1929. So we could look at just what a president said. Unscripted (or as close an approximation as is possible for a president).

Okay. We had the algorithms. We had the text. On to…

Methodology

As mentioned previously, we narrowed our samples from Hoover forward to just press conferences, presidential debates and interviews. Of course, within those, we only use words spoken by the President, nothing else.

This left us with a deep sample for each, but spread out. We ran the analysis two ways:

• Complete. Whatever we have, we have. On the low end, it’s 44,705 words for Gerald Ford, up to 1,124,164 words for Bill Clinton. Trump clocked in second at 915,801 words.
• Equal Sample. We then ran the same test on 30,000 words, plus or minus 1% (actual range was 30,003 – 30,253 words), where we looked only within the person’s presidency (no pre-election debates) and started from Inauguration Day forward, adding sentences until we hit 30,000, then stopped and analyzed those.

In addition, we’ve been testing the Lexile framework. It’s a free test so we’re limited to 1,000 words. But we took the first 1,000 words (in full sentence format) from the equal sample and tested those.

It’s important to note: for the two presidents where social media existed, this was not included. This was strictly utilizing the responses given by a president in an interview, during a press conference, or in a political debate.

The Result

It statistically made no difference which way we analyzed it, or which method. It affected some scores and some of the ranks, but not the position of Donald Trump on that list. In each case, he ranked last of the past 15 presidents.

By every metric and methodology tested, Donald Trump’s vocabulary and grammatical structure is significantly more simple, and less diverse, than any President since Herbert Hoover, when measuring “off-script” words, that is, words far less likely to have been written in advance for the speaker.

Significant is not editorializing. The gap between Trump and the next closest president (in most indices, Harry Truman, known historically for a folksy, simple pattern of speech), is larger than any other gap using Flesch-Kincaid. Statistically speaking, there is a significant gap.

This gap appears both when using the complete corpus available to us for all presidents, and the more limited 30,000 word set to use an equal data set for each. In either data set, Donald Trump consistently clocks in at the bottom of the list. Depending on the scale used, it’s between a 3rd and 7th grade reading level.

Using the same one used by the Department of Defense, the grade level on the equal sample is 4.6. That’s between a fourth and fifth grade level.

The next closest is Truman at 5.9, followed by Bush 41 at 6.7. The top three: Herbert Hoover (11.3), Jimmy Carter (10.7) and Barack Obama (9.7).

In terms of word diversity and structure, Trump averages 1.33 syllables per word, which all others average 1.42 – 1.57 words. In terms of variety of vocabulary, in the 30,000-word sample, Trump was at the bottom, with 2,605 unique words in that sample while all others averaged 3,068 – 3,869. The exception: Bill Clinton, who clocked in at 2,752 words in our unique sample.

So What?

That’s a fair question. So what? Vocabulary is not a proxy for intelligence. In IQ Tests, vocabulary is a component, but only a component.  However, it is used as a proxy for a number of things:

• Doctors use it to measure symptoms of degenerative brain diseases (note: as blogged previously, we see no downward trend over 40 years in Trump’s vocabulary. For unscripted, it’s very consistent).
• Psychologists use vocabulary as a measure of intellectual curiosity and a person’s reading ability.

But also, it should be pointed out:

• Politicians strive to get a clear, concise message in front of the public. That includes keeping it short and simple.

Other than Donald Trump, all presidents in this cohort were either career politicians, or in the case of Eisenhower, a very public figure and military leader for decades before running for president (historians argue whether a general at Eisenhower’s level would already be considered a politician before running for office, due to the need to navigate very political waters at that level).

Back to so what? In answer to those who emailed the equivalent of “is the president a stable genius”, the answer is “we don’t know.” Short of IQ tests, there’s no way to know for sure.

But what we can say is, compared to the 14 presidents who preceded him, by every measure, his use of words when off script are significantly less diverse, and simpler, than all presidents who preceded him back to Herbert Hoover.

As always, feel free to dispute the analysis, but come prepared with data. We don’t need more opinions. But more analysis with supporting data is always welcome.

Here’s the data. Have fun!

[Note: Hmm… thought the plug in would download all the tabs, not just one. Oh well. This is the Google Sheets link…

id	president	Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level	Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease	Gunning Fog Index	Coleman-Liau Index	SMOG Index	Automated Readability Index	Dale Chall Readability Score	Average Words / Sentence	Average Syllables / Word	Word Count	Unique Words	Lexile Score (Low)	Lexile Score (High)	Lexile Word Count	Chart Label
45	Donald Trump	4.60	82.50	7.40	7.70	5.80	3.20	2.80	11.59	1.33	30,252	2,605	600	700	974	Trump
33	Harry S. Truman	5.90	72.70	7.80	9.90	6.90	4.80	4.40	11.25	1.45	30,009	3,246	800	900	896	Truman
41	George H. W. Bush	6.70	71.90	9.10	9.60	7.30	5.90	4.00	13.98	1.43	30,132	3,308	700	800	925	Bush 41
43	George W. Bush	7.40	67.00	9.80	10.20	7.90	6.40	4.40	14.11	1.48	31,064	3,297	1000	1100	951	Bush 43
32	Franklin D. Roosevelt	7.40	70.70	10.00	9.20	7.80	6.60	3.50	16.15	1.42	30,095	3,409	1100	1200	908	FDR
36	Lyndon B. Johnson	7.60	67.70	10.20	10.00	8.20	6.90	4.20	15.43	1.46	30,036	3,191	1300	1400	975	LBJ
40	Ronald Reagan	8.00	68.50	10.70	9.70	8.10	7.60	4.10	17.24	1.43	30,038	3,485	1100	1200	974	Reagan
35	John F. Kennedy	8.80	63.70	11.20	10.10	9.00	8.30	4.60	17.94	1.48	30,003	3,289	1100	1200	953	Kennedy
42	Bill Clinton	9.30	64.60	12.00	9.60	9.00	9.00	4.10	20.23	1.44	30,040	2,752	1100	1200	916	Clinton
37	Richard Nixon	9.40	63.30	12.10	9.80	9.20	9.00	4.50	19.87	1.46	30,022	3,068	1200	1300	939	Nixon
34	Dwight D. Eisenhower	9.40	64.10	12.20	9.60	9.00	9.20	4.20	20.57	1.44	30,005	3,269	1100	1200	945	Eisenhower
38	Gerald Ford	9.40	60.80	11.80	10.30	9.40	8.70	4.70	18.52	1.50	30,092	3,287	1300	1400	923	Ford
44	Barack Obama	9.70	58.10	12.10	11.20	9.50	9.30	5.00	18.23	1.54	30,006	3,869	1200	1300	979	Obama
39	Jimmy Carter	10.70	54.60	13.30	11.40	10.20	10.40	5.20	20.22	1.56	30,070	3,624	1100	1200	973	Carter
31	Herbert Hoover	11.30	51.90	14.40	11.40	10.90	11.00	4.90	21.38	1.57	30,170	3,471	1200	1300	912	Hoover

The Stern Thing

[Update: 9/27/17: Audio has been removed per DMCA notice from SiriusXM. Think it should be public? Feel free to let @SternShow and @SiriusXM know.]

[Update: 9/30/17: TrumpOnStern.com kindly pointed out we missed two Stern shows. Donald Trump appeared on November 9, 1995 for 22 minutes and January 20, 1994 for at least 8 minutes (the audio is not complete). The post below reflects the data without those two shows included.]

Be careful what you wish for. It could screw up your month.

So… the Howard Stern / Donald Trump interviews. It’s been a bit of an obsession of ours. But not for the reasons you might think.

There have been some articles written before the election about Howard Stern, primarily by Andrew Kaczynski and Nate McDermott at Buzzfeed and later at CNN, Virginia Heffernan at Politico, David Fahrenhold at The Washington Post and others, including Mother Jones and The Atlantic.

These all quoted excerpts from these interviews. By our count, we found about 20 minutes of audio total covering about a dozen interviews.

If you’ve listened to Howard Stern before, you know you can find something salacious without a great deal of effort, and the interviews with Donald Trump were no exception.

However, the stories (with the exception of Heffernan’s excellent piece) didn’t address what we thought were two key points.

1. Howard Stern is an excellent interviewer. Guests can spend two hours or longer speaking with Stern. His staff preps him well and they are impeccably researched, and move from making out with girls to port security in Dubai effortlessly. Howard Stern gets people to speak about things that, in any other context, they would never discuss.
2. Based on our research, no one has spent more time interviewing Donald Trump publicly than Howard Stern, both in terms of the length of the interviews, the number, and over a larger period of time.

We wanted that record for our database. It’s a gaping hole.

But therein lies the problem. Howard Stern has done, conservatively more than 8,000 shows since the 1980s, and that number is probably low. Based on the normal length, that’s at least 30,000 hours of audio and likely a minimum of 50,000,000 words. And there’s no definitive record. If Stern has the list, it hasn’t been shared.

We’ve found snippets and pieces before. But, per our mission, we want to ensure that anything in our database is the full transcript, versus an excerpt. As such, we were interested in the full record of conversations between Donald Trump and Howard Stern from the 1990s forward. To make sure we had it all, we wanted the whole show to check.

Our research indicated he was on the show dozens of times, but not the details, exact dates, etc. We reached out to people who operate fan sites, particularly marksfriggin.com, and on the Internet, particularly via Reddit. Stern fans are known for collecting recordings of old shows, so we were hoping to find the full recordings,

We were  insulted in ways both creative and thorough, but kept trying. In short, we struck out. By the spring, we had shifted our focus to building out the features on the site.

And Suddenly…

Out of the blue, early in the morning September 5th, about 3 1/2 months after we had moved on, we received an email with a Dropbox link from an anonymous Yahoo account. We looked and to our surprise, it was several dozen MP3s with the entire show, end-to-end, which allowed us to verify we were capturing the entire interview. We copied the MP3s and quickly emailed back to ask a couple of clarifying questions. We were not-so-politely told to leave them alone.

Between the files and extensive research on marksfriggin.com and other sites, we were able to verify 35 unique interviews, beginning May 8, 1993 on Howard Stern’s E! interview show, through August 25, 2015. There were other MP3s, but they contained Stern talking about Trump, or a time when Trump was supposed to dial in but couldn’t, or in one case, a re-run. We filtered those out.

So we got to work, transcribing, proofreading, cross-checking. This is harder than it sounds. Our transcription robots are good. But the show is fast paced (235 words per minute by our measure), filled with crosstalk, music and other sound effects in the background, noise. It mixes clean audio with phone audio. It’s the greatest hits list of “things that mess with algorithms.”

Combine that with a mixed bag of recording methods, and our robot was none too happy with us. So it involved a lot more manual work than we like.

The transcripts are complete but we’ll be working them towards perfection for some time. But they’re just about there, and married to the audio, and run through our usual battery of audio, text and voice analysis. (And please, when in doubt, listen to the audio).

But after investing more than two weeks, there’s just too much to do. We’ll keep tweaking in our spare time, but there’s only so many hours of the day before you start writing your blog posts at 3:45 am. Just sayin’.

Yeah Yeah Yeah. Whatcha Got?

Donald Trump’s time on Howard Stern totals 15 hours, 8 minutes and 52 seconds, with 104,357 words spoken by Donald Trump. This is 21% longer than his first book, “The Art of the Deal” (86,575 words). Hell, it’s almost half as long as the Frost / Nixon Interviews.

Based on our records, this is far more time Trump has spent in an interview than any other journalist or media personality, including Morning Joe, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews, Larry King, Don Imus… any of them. This is in terms of the number of interviews, the length, the time period.

Trump has spent far more time, over a far longer period of time, speaking in greater depth with Howard Stern than any other interviewer. No one has spent more time interviewing Donald Trump in a public setting than Howard Stern, and in particular spanning more than two decades. Having these interviews in our database provides a crucial perspective.

We stopped counting after more than 500 unique questions and answers. Yes, lots of questions about sex, positions, his views on women, and things you don’t find in any other interviews (AIDS, Chlamydia, group sex, groping in public… our robot keyworded a lot of new things… we chose not to teach our AI some things. It leads to scary things). But also, lots on North Korea, Iraq, infrastructure and taxation. The Port of Dubai security was a real question. And it was answered.

Some of the stories Trump told repeat themselves across multiple years. He discusses a great deal about his personal life. And most of the interviews had a specific hook: boxing matches Trump was promoting, new books, The Apprentice and, toward the end of the series, a great deal more about politics.

We also had to develop a custom taxonomy and classification. A good many of the questions and answers are, in Stern’s style, leading. For example, an oft-quoted excerpt from a 42-minute interview had the following segment:

Donald Trump: My daughter is beautiful, Ivanka. She…
Howard Stern: By the way, your daughter.
Donald Trump: She’s beautiful.
Howard Stern: Can I say this? A piece of ass.
Donald Trump: Yeah.

He didn’t say his daughter was “a piece of ass.” However, he did not argue the point.

This follows a pattern throughout the interviews of Stern making a statement as a question and Trump either confirming or denying the statement without repeating it. Trump first explicitly stated he wouldn’t answer a question on September 23, 2004, his 20th interview with Stern. As the interviews evolved closer to 2015, the rate of objections increased.

The interviews begin on May 8, 1993, before Tiffany and Barron were born, Eric was 9, Ivanka was 12 and Don Jr. 16. He had just divorced his first wife, Ivana, and was dating Marla Maples. The last interview was on August 25, 2015, two months after he announced his 2016 presidential run. He and Melania had been married a decade, his children were married and he had starred in two famous television shows.

So Is This Everything?

We are almost sure we have them all. Daily records of Stern’s show prior to 1997 are difficult to find. Is it possible we missed one? Absolutely. But we’re pretty sure we’ve got them all. If we’re wrong, we’d love to know the dates and get to work transcribing.

Also, please check the audio. We think we did a good job tagging who is speaking. But when in doubt, hit play. And if we’re wrong, let us know so we can fix it.

You can find all the transcripts here:

Howard Stern – Donald Trump Interviews

They’re also in the general search, of course. The audio files can be found on SoundCloud, or you can download them all here.

9/27/17 – Audio has been removed per DMCA notice from SiriusXM. Think it should be public? Feel free to let @SternShow and @SiriusXM know.