Much is remarkable about the reconstructed transcript of Mr. Trump’s July phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, which was released by the White House Wednesday following the beginning of a formal impeachment inquiry . Not least is the unambiguous finding that Mr. Trump urged a foreign leader to investigate a political rival.

But in a presidency pocked with the less-than-regal vocabulary of this Washington moment — tweets about witch hunts and hoaxes, liars and leakers — the document is also striking for its window into the singular verbal tics and strategic instincts of the executive speaker: part flattery-laden banter (“Your economy is going to get better and better I predict”), part foreboding ambiguity (“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation”).

This is the new language of American diplomacy, a high-level conversation between two world leaders that can feel lifted from a Manhattan real estate deal — or from a B-movie script about Manhattan real estate deals.

“He’s trying to make it look like he’s not asking,” said Barbara A. Res , a former executive vice president of the Trump Organization. “It’s not ‘I want you to.’ It’s ‘it would be good of you,’ ‘it would be helpful.’ And I’ve seen him do that before. He did that with his people when he wanted you to do something that was questionable so that he could say that he didn’t say it.”

To surmount this obstacle, Mr. Trump seemed to rely in his call on a well-worn sleight of attribution: i nsisting that the thing he wants to talk about is actually a thing that everybody is talking about — in this case, the would-be corruption of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son.