Reading a typical Truth Social post from former President Donald Trump is a wild ride, rhetorically speaking: There’s name-calling, naturally, and the ALL-CAPS DECLARATIVES about how weak his enemies are. Then there’s the other weird thing the former president does with capitalization, where he caps the beginning of words for seemingly no good reason.

This post-debate missive from his Truth Social feed is a good example. Note the random capitalization of the “Radical Left Candidate,” “Second Debate,” and “destroyed our Country.”

Trump doesn’t save his odd linguistic choices for social media; he’s got a unique way of speaking, too, including a habit of referencing huge, abstract figures: “Millions and millions.” “Billions and billions.” (In 2017, Vice was able to cobble together a two-minute compilation of all the times Trump said “billions and billions” ― think of how long it would be now!)

There’s also his sweeping use of “everyone” and “everybody.” The times he’s claimed “everyone agrees” are almost too numerous to count.

And we wrote a whole story about his use of the third person: “They all want the endorsement of Trump,” he said of his political influence in 2021. “It’s a very important treasure.”

What do all these peccadillos of speech mean, if anything? Leaving the obvious lies and exaggerations aside, is he just blithely ignorant of language conventions, or is he consciously crafting these messages to look and sound the way they do?

Some experts believe Trump genuinely does use language and style as a weapon, including Jennifer Mercieca, a professor in the department of communication and journalism at Texas A&M University and the author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.”

“Trump has been attacking American minds for the past nine years,” she said. “He uses language to prevent us from holding him accountable for his words and actions.”

As interesting as it is to parse Trump’s diction and distinct communication style, some linguists feel that the content of his speeches is revealing enough on its own.

“When Trump settles on a topic and hammers away at it using lies or outrageous bluster, it has the effect of setting the agenda for everyone,” said Daniel Midgley, a linguist and co-host of the “Because Language” podcast.

Think about the infamous “they’re eating the dogs” statement mid-debate this month, Midgley said. It was “so weird and unhinged” that it was all anybody could talk about for two weeks, he said.

“The story was debunked and ridiculed, but that didn’t matter because what was everyone discussing? Immigration, an area where Trump feels solid,” he said. “And as a consequence, no one was talking about Kamala Harris’ plans for cutting taxes for middle-class families or securing the right to choose.”

But other experts think there is value in studying how Trump speaks. Below, linguists and other experts who’ve analyzed Trump’s unique use of language share some of his more interesting rhetorical tricks.

He’s a big fan of CAPITALIZED words.

The use of capital letters is designed to signal what scholars call “language intensity,” Mercieca told HuffPost.

“Donald Trump is the Outrage President, he doesn’t seek to be ‘presidential’ but what he called ‘modern day presidential,’” the professor said. “He is the first president to take advantage of outrage media and the algorithmic bias toward outrage and use it for campaigning and the presidency.”

As Mercieca sees it, Trump is constantly feeding outrage content into the public sphere ― through rallies, tweets and interviews. When he uses capital letters in social media posts, it’s designed to signal to the reader that something is important or to link an intense emotion with the words.

“It’s hard to convey emotion online, so we frequently use emojis ― Trump uses capitalization,” she said. “It’s not too different from what 18th-century typesetters did when they had a controversial pamphlet: For example, look at the capitalization from John Dickinson’s 1774 “Letters from a Farmer, in Pennsylvania.”

Is the all-caps strategy effective? Depends on whom you ask.

“All caps feels like shouting to most people, so for those who are receptive to his messages, I can only assume the messages feel impassioned, like he really cares,” said Carrie Gillon, a linguist and the cohost of “Vocal Fries,” a podcast about linguistic discrimination.

For those who are less receptive, all caps may come across as simultaneously childish and a touch AARP.

“We’ve all known that one older person who didn’t know how to turn the all-caps off,” Gillion said. “He clearly does know how to turn it off and on, so that’s not what’s going on. He’s obviously using it for emphasis. It feels weird because he’s a politician, and we expect more polish in text and in person than we get from him.”

He’s all about the emphatics: never, always, everyone.

Jesse Egbert, a professor of applied linguistics at Northern Arizona University, has studied Trump’s distinctive linguistic style, comparing it to all previous presidential candidates back to Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960.

One thing Egbert found is that, compared to past candidates, Trump is far more likely to use what he calls “boosted stance” to intensify claims and get a heightened emotional response from his audience: “always,” “never” and other intensifiers like “so much more.”

In his most recent debate with vice president Kamala Harris, Trump used a “boosted stance” ― “never, ever” ― while discussing the war in Ukraine:

If I were president, Russia would have never, ever ― I know Putin very well. He would have never ― and there was no threat of it either, by the way, for four years ― have gone into Ukraine and killed millions of people when you add it up.”

All those “nevers” and “always” add up: “Trump used the word ‘never’ 27 times in the most recent debate, more than five times as frequently as Harris who only used the word five times,” Egbert reported.

The random capitalization may be a way to convey tone ― specifically, an aggressive tone.

The random capitalization ― the “Radical Left Candidate,” “Second Debate,” “destroyed our Country” in that earlier Truth post example ― reminds Gillion of German, in that all nouns are capitalized in German.

“I doubt that’s what he’s going for ― or I don’t think it’s in any way conscious, anyway ― but it’s what I think of every time,” she said.

Instead, Gillion thinks it’s another form of emphasis, as Trump has said himself.

“Given how hard tone is to convey over text, I think it’s kind of clever to use the English writing system in this way,” she said. “I think it helps the reader read his posts in his voice. It’s just jarring for those of us who aren’t super into the content of the message. For them, the overuse of capitals may feel aggressive.”

He’s a big numbers guy: Hundreds and hundreds, millions and millions!

Here are a few examples of all the times Trump has thrown out big numbers:

• “So many hundreds and hundreds of companies are doing this.” (Trump/Clinton 2016, debate 1)

• “She wants 550% more people than Barack Obama. And he has thousands and thousands of people. (Trump/Clinton 2016, Debate 3)

• “What she doesn’t say is that President Obama has deported millions and millions of people. (Trump/Clinton 2016, Debate 3)

• “But when you look at what she’s done to our country and when you look at these millions and millions of people that are pouring into our country monthly.” (Trump/Harris 2024, Debate 1)

The vague numbers in these statements may seem pulled out of nowhere, but surprisingly, most of them are technically accurate, albeit at times misleading, Egbert said. As he explained in an essay he co-wrote about Trump’s language:

When interpreted literally, ‘millions and millions’ means that there are two million or more. In the case of Trump’s reference to Obama’s deportation record, as of the debate, the Obama administration had seen 2.5 million deportations, just slightly over the minimum number required to make ‘millions and millions’ technically accurate. It is likely that at least some listeners were picturing many more than 2.5 million.

He speaks often of “they” and “them.”

While most candidates use vivid narratives about specific people to express the problems and difficulties faced by many Americans, Trump has an unconventional way of depicting such issues, said Jennifer Sclafani, an assistant professor of applied linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of “Talking Donald Trump.”

“Trump tends to remain at a very general level, linguistically speaking, referring to ‘they’ or ‘them,’ or ‘the people,’ never specifying exactly what individuals or groups he is referring to, except to label people as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’” Sclafani told HuffPost.

We see this in the example of “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” in the last debate: “He never explicitly stated who ‘they’ were. Instead, he left it up to the audience to connect the dots and realize it was immigrants,” she said.

It should be noted that this is a normal feature of everyday conversation, Sclafani said: “We rely on our listeners to do some interpretive work whenever we talk, because we assume familiarity, but it is unusual to do so in a formal public speech.”

He uses the “Gish gallop.”

As Mercieca has shared before, when Trump fabricates, he tends to pile them on so it’s difficult for the listener to keep track of each statement.

“As an interviewer, you try to get Trump to specifically answer a question, but he tells 20 lies in the process and you can’t stop each of those 20 lies, especially if you focus on the one question you’re trying to get an answer,” she tweeted last year after his “Meet The Press” interview. “That’s called ‘Gish gallop’ by old timey propaganda folks.”

He’s always “just saying.”

In the study of rhetorics, paralipsis is a device where you draw attention to a topic by denying that it is being discussed: “I’m not saying you’re responsible for spilling that glass of milk,” for instance, which leaves the milk spiller feeling very responsible.

Trump is a big fan of using paralipsis, Mercieca said.

“You’ll often hear him say ‘I’m not saying’ or ‘I’m just saying,’” she said. “Ironically, he’ll say two things at once to deny accountability: I was just using sarcasm, I’m not saying he conspired, but it was written in the papers.”

Overall, he has an “oddly adolescent” way of speaking.

In an MSNBC interview, linguist John McWhorter commented that the way Trump speaks is “oddly adolescent.”

Could someone whose speech is the equivalent of a teen boy’s truly succeed at being manipulative? Is he a skilled orator in his own way, or just another undisciplined yapper on the internet (or maybe a bit of both)?

“I actually do think he knows what he’s doing, though perhaps not fully consciously,” Gillon said. “It’s impossible to know, of course, but the feeling I get from Trump is that he is very canny, and tries a lot of strategies and uses whatever works in the moment, and what has worked in the past for him.”

That doesn’t mean the former president is plotting it all out, reading Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” or even thinking too deeply about how he sounds. At the heart of it, he’s much more of an ad-libber, Gillon argued. And although his speech and text may feel adolescent, this might make his messages easier to understand and absorb for those who are receptive to it.

“It probably helps with his demagoguery, the ‘man of the people’ vibe,” Gillon said. “I can’t think of anyone who talks quite like Trump. He does feel unique. While all the strategies he uses have been used by others ― fascist regimes, for example ― his particular style is all his own: Trumpian.”