"More and more less confident"

Language Log 2025-06-12

From Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, "U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem Braces for Possible Israeli Strike on Iran" NYT 6/12/2025:

More recently, however, Mr. Trump has said he was less convinced that talks with Iran would yield a new nuclear deal.

“I’m getting more and more less confident about it,” he told The New York Post in a podcast broadcast on Wednesday.

Here's the podcast on YouTube. The quoted phrase is from around 35:08:

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uh I'm f- I'm getting more and more less confident about it

"More and more less ADJ" is Out There — e.g. COCA has

Obama should stick to reality, but that appears more and more less likely from him. Kids are becoming more and more less active and using their imagination less and less.

I haven't found (or thought up) any examples of "less and less more ADJ". And I think there's a semantico-pragmatic reason for the fact that "more and more less ADJ" is more plausible than "less and less more ADJ".  But working out the formal logic is giving me a headache, so I'll leave it to the commenters.