Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images
Throughout his political career, Donald Trump has been known for his incoherent tirades. The issue isn’t just that he peppers his speeches with weird asides, like “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” or “death by shark versus electrocution.” What you may miss if you mainly consume his rallies via brief clips on social media is that these anecdotes are often tucked into longer bouts of free-association word salad. Here’s an example, which was flagged by NBC News, from a speech Trump gave in Michigan last week:
[Kamala Harris] destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s — and I own a big building there — it’s no — I shouldn’t talk about this but that’s okay I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world — sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, “What do you think you lost?” I said, “Probably 2, 3 billion. That’s okay, I don’t care.” They say, “You think you’d do it again?” And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, “Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.” I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?
No one could follow this. But according to Trump, that’s on us, not him.
During a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on August 30, Trump asserted that what the “Fake News” describes as rambling is actually a genius-level rhetorical device he calls “the weave.”
“You know, I do the weave,” Trump 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.’”
This is far from the first time Trump has tried to deny or explain away allegations of incoherence. When he kept publicly mixing up the names Barack Obama and Joe Biden, he said we just don’t understand sarcasm. After a Wall Street Journal poll that found nearly half of respondents didn’t think Trump is mentally up to the presidency, he bragged about passing a dementia test years earlier, and challenged Rupert Murdoch and the paper’s editors to do the same. And in response to reports that he had a bizarre public post-DNC meltdown, Trump insisted in a Truth Social post that Fox News called him first (which wasn’t the issue) and that Maureen Dowd is “gilted” (whatever that means).
None of this really made any sense, but presumably these arguments, much like Trump’s meandering rally tirades, were crystal clear to his many English-professor friends. It’s lucky for Trump that academics who have no problem breaking down his Ulysses-esque political messaging make up such a huge portion of the American electorate!
