Donald Trump: This run-on sentence from a speech in Sun City, South Carolina, is in desperate need of diagramming.

Help Us Diagram This Sentence by Donald Trump!

Help Us Diagram This Sentence by Donald Trump!

Lexicon Valley
A Blog About Language
July 31 2015 7:42 PM

Help Us Diagram This Sentence by Donald Trump!

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My sentences are the best. Nobody can top my sentences.

Photo by Richard Ellis/Getty Images

At the Slate Political Gabfest's live D.C. show this week, Emily, David, and John tried to diagram a sentence uttered in Sun City, South Carolina, on July 21 by the ever-eloquent Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. They were defeated.

But, as this is America, the story doesn't end there. Readers and listeners, can one of you prevail where the Gabfesters stumbled? Below, we've posted a video of Trump speaking the sentence; under that, you'll find the written text. If you refuse to be stumped by Trump, send your best diagrammatic effort (in screenshot, JPG, or PDF form, please) to politicalgabfest@slate.com. Those who succeed can look forward to Donald-level bragging rights!

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 you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s 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 we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is 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 what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s 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.