Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
For weeks, former President Donald J. Trump’s advisers have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message.
But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.
“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”
Asked for examples of the technique, the Trump campaign provided what it called a “masterclass weave” — a four-minute, 20-second video of the candidate speaking at a rally in Asheville, N.C., in August in which he bounces from energy bills to Hunter Biden’s laptop to Venezuelan tar to mental institutions in Caracas to migrant crime to “the green new scam” to Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Unlike Kamala Harris, who can’t put together a coherent sentence without a teleprompter, President Trump speaks for hours, telling multiple impressive stories at the same time,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump. “Kamala Harris could never.”
His campaign did not identify which English professor friends of his had complimented his style.
“I highly doubt that Donald Trump has any English professor friends,” said Timothy O’Brien, a Trump biographer. “What this really reflects is that he is aware of the criticism that he is publicly saying nonlinear, nonsensical word salad, and he is trying to pretend there is a strategy or logic behind it when there isn’t.”
The weave — a word more commonly associated with tapestry, tailoring and cosmetology — is a new formulation for Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee for president.
Certainly, in the history of narrative, there have been writers celebrated for their ability to be discursive only to cleverly tie together all their themes with a neat bow at the end — William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Larry David come to mind. But in the case of Mr. Trump, it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell.
James Joyce was celebrated for his stream of consciousness that, over the course of hundreds of pages, revealed a person’s temperament. William Faulkner was an early adopter of the weave, engaging in a kind of circular storytelling, as seen in “Absalom, Absalom!” These weavers were trying to capture on the page the inconstant nature of a shifting mind.
Drew Lichtenberg, a lecturer at Catholic University of America and an artistic producer at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, said that “the closest comparison to what Trump is talking about here in Shakespeare — fragments of unrelated subjects that are woven together — is, of course, Lear’s mad scene at Dover.”
In a world of canned political speeches, Mr. Trump’s style is beloved by his supporters, who enjoy these frequent glimpses into his id. Indeed, Sigmund Freud pioneered using free association with his patients to uncover the unconscious mind. And yet, Mr. Trump seemed to be feeling slightly sensitive about his own speaking style on Friday: “The fake news, you know what they say? ‘He rambled.’ That’s not rambling.”
He is not the first president to have his rhetorical style criticized. President Warren G. Harding’s way of speaking was lampooned in 1921 by the newspaper columnist H.L. Mencken, who called it “Gamalielese,” after the 29th president’s middle name, Gamaliel. “It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it,” Mr. Mencken wrote. “It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
Mr. Trump, who was the 45th president and is running to be the 47th, elaborated on his own oratorical technique on Friday. “What you do,” he said, “is you get off a subject, to mention another little tidbit. Then you get back onto the subject, and you go through this, and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.”
weave - oratorical nonsense from a room temperature IQ that's continuously crossing the boundary of dementia...
Moronic meandering .
an addled teenage bully stuck in the body of a 79 year old sack of shit.
Isn't that Alzheimer's?
I forget.
It's a long list actually, none of them good.
dev got it started with
1. Traitor
lol - I didn't get that right away
you can get a ticket for weaving while driving...
Why yes....yes you can
His words are not important, that's why I never listen to any of his speeches or interviews. Tuned him out way back when he dissed McCain. Only Republican policies and ideas matter and he's the Republican candidate. Still not sure if I will vote for him, since he won't win Colorado anyway.
maga relics in colorado should probably keep pens in their mailboxes ...
He's a life long Dem, now wearing no clothes without any shame or cognitive salvation.
trump's policies and ideas are republican?
what more will it take to convince you either way?
"Weave"? That explain the mangy orangutan hide on Trump's head!
'mangy orangutan hide'
his weave has transitioned a lot since he beat it out of DC back in 01/2, even more so recently...
heh ... 01/21
He is really pathetic.
'the weave'
More like warped.
warped and twisted ...