Donald Trump says "China"

October 19, 2015

Came across this video recently of Donald Trump saying “China” over and over again.

It’s pretty funny, of course. But politics aside, I thought it was interesting that after watching it for several minutes (yeah, I watched the whole thing…), I started to get the impression that he was actually speaking a different language — China-ese, if you will. I suppose that’s because the instances of him saying “China” all vary in pitch, intensity, duration, etc., so back-to-back-to-back they start to feel linguistically coherent. And then the parts where he actually injects a bit of English kind of feel like code-switching. Weird.

Of course, this exact phenomenon has been exploited at least once already, in my favorite scene of one of my favorite movies, Being John Malkovich. Enjoy.