Many of the techniques Trump uses in his speeches are timeworn propaganda maneuvers, used by demagogues across the centuries: appealing to voters’ emotions, rather than their intellects; constantly repeating a handful of simplistic ideas in easy-to-remember phrases (“Make America Great Again,” “America First”); using us-versus-them formulations and coded (or not-so-coded) language about minorities and immigrants that play to audiences’ resentments and fears; relentlessly assailing “enemies” with memorable epithets (“Crooked Hillary,” “Lyin’ Ted”).

Precise words, like facts, appear not to mean that much to Trump.

If Trump’s favorite form of communication, Twitter, is emblematic of his own short attention span and appetite for the verbal punch-and-jab, it’s also a reminder of how uncannily adapted his use of language has been to our A.D.D., information-overloaded era in which the loudest, shrillest and most sensationalistic voices tend to be the ones heard above the din of data, and get the most clicks online, the most eyeballs on TV. His sowing of discord (for instance, against women, against Muslims, against Mexicans) reflects an increasingly polarized landscape in which technology has allowed people to retreat to narrow silos, talking only to like-minded folks; just as his willful contempt for facts (from questioning whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States to his claim that he watched “thousands and thousands of people” cheering in New Jersey, “when the World Trade Center came tumbling down” on 9/11) mirrors a cultural landscape in which subjectivity and fake news are ascendant. His supporter, the political commentator Scottie Nell Hughes, has gone so far as to declare that “there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.”

Precise words, like facts, appear not to mean that much to Trump. He has said he sometimes fails to “choose the right words,” without apologizing for specific insults, or acknowledging that the content of his remarks might be offensive or utterly untrue. At times, he seems more focused on his performance than on the words issuing from his mouth. Meet the Press host Chuck Todd observed that after several of his appearances as a candidate, Trump would lean back in his chair and ask the control room to replay his appearance on a monitor—without sound: “He wants to see what it all looked like. He will watch the whole thing on mute.”

When it comes to Trump’s aides and supporters, they are often left scrambling to explain, rationalize or walk-back his more alarming statements, which can contradict previous remarks he or Cabinet members or Republican leaders have made. An adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who met with Trump after the election, said their delegation was told by people around the then president-elect: “We don’t have to take each word that Mr. Trump said publicly literally.”

In unscripted remarks, Trump’s blunt promises (about, say, building a wall) and boasts are often embedded, as small nuggets of verbal clarity, amid yards and yards of words, strung together in tortured syntax that is the bane of translators and transcribers. He has a taste for short punchy words (“Sad!”) and studies have variously ranked his talk at a third, fourth or sixth grade level. His sentences are stuffed full with shaggy-dog digressions, frequent narcissistic asides, false starts, odd qualifiers, and free associative ramblings.

When asked during the first debate with Hillary Clinton about the Iraq war, this was part of Trump’s answer: “The record shows that I’m right. When I did an interview with Howard Stern, very lightly, first time anyone’s asked me that, I said, very lightly, I don’t know, maybe, who knows? Essentially. I then did an interview with Neil Cavuto. We talked about the economy is more important. I then spoke to Sean Hannity, which everybody refuses to call Sean Hannity. I had numerous conversations with Sean Hannity at Fox. And Sean Hannity said—and he called me the other day—and I spoke to him about it—he said you were totally against the war, because he was for the war.”

This incoherent “word salad,” as observers have called it, and its attendant ambiguity gives Trump a lot of room to maneuver—and gives Republican allies room to reinterpret and spin. It contributes to the chaos that frequently seems to swirl around Trump and his team, which, in turn, leads to confusion and outrage fatigue on the part of voters and the press.

In the case of foreign policy, in particular, such confusion can also have unforeseen consequences “We’re just operating in this world where you cannot believe the things he says,” said Eliot Cohen, a former official with the State Department in the George W. Bush administration. “It will have large consequences for our allies and our adversaries, and it’s going to greatly magnify the danger of miscalculation by all kinds of people.”

It’s a somber reminder, despite Team Trump’s cynical and transactional use of language, that words—and the precise use of words—do matter very much.

Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani