NEW YORK - For weeks, advisers to former US president Donald Trump have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message.
But on Aug 30, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 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, North Carolina, 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.
In its disjointed way, it did all sort of seem to wend back to why he thinks he should be president again.
“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 Ms Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for 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 Mr Timothy O’Brien, a Trump biographer. “What this really reflects is that he is aware of the criticism that he is publicly saying non-linear, 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 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 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.
Renowned Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, ruminated about Trump’s use of the word: “I read Trump’s comment bragging that ‘I do the weave’. I take him at his word, as one of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of ‘weave’ is ‘to pursue a devious course.’”
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.
Dr Drew Lichtenberg, a lecturer at Catholic University of America and an artistic producer at the Shakespeare Theatre 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, 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, Trump seemed to be feeling slightly sensitive about his own speaking style, saying on Aug 30: “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 criticised. President Warren G. Harding’s way of speaking was lampooned in 1921 by 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,” 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.”
Trump, who was the 45th president and is running to be the 47th, elaborated on his own oratorical technique on Aug 30. “What you do,” he said, “is you get off a subject, to mention another little tidbit. Then you get back on to the subject, and you go through this, and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.” NYTIMES
