He uses imprecision as a way of making statements in which he parrots unknown and possibly nonexistent sourcing — ironically, the very thing that this projectionist accuses the “fake news” of doing.

He does this by couching wild accusations and conspiracy theories with the phrase “people are saying.” Which people? Names, please. And, how many do these “people” number? Again, this is uncheckable phrasing. With nearly 330 million people in America and seven billion on the planet, it would be hard to find a thing that some people are not saying, so in a way, you could say pretty much anything and safely bet that some other people are saying the same thing in some form.

Trump sometimes strings these phrases together in whole passages that suggest a certitude that is clearly absent.

In a March 2017 interview with Time magazine, Trump discussed his patently false claim that he had been wiretapped by Obama, saying: “And a lot of information has just been learned, and a lot of information may be learned over the next coming period of time. We will see what happens.”

This habit stretches all the way back to the campaign. At a 2015 campaign event, when a man said, “We have a problem in this country: It’s called ‘Muslim,’” and continued by saying, “You know our current president is one,” and then asked when “we” could “get rid of” the “training camps growing, where they want to kill us,” Trump didn’t object or correct that man, but instead responded:

“We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. And, you know, a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to be looking at that and many other things.”

This is a Rorschach test of rhetoric, where meaning splits from emotion. The answer itself is a string of meaningless, immeasurable, unenumerated pledges and accusations held together by spit and hostility. It is instead the emotion that registers. He abhors Muslims as much as the questioner and wants to reassure the questioner of such.

Trump not only uses language to tell blatant lies, he also uses it to pack softer lies, exaggerations and enigmatic inaccuracies around the edges.