On the same day that the Washington Post announced that it would not endorse a Presidential candidate, the following article appeared, written by Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey. Actually, I saw the article on the Post website Friday morning but by Friday night it had disappeared from the website. I searched for it at 1 am early Saturday morning and could not find it. It was posted again this morning with yesterday’s date. It’s a long article, but well worth the read.
It reads like a rebuttal to Jeff Bezos’ decision not to endorse a candidate, not to choose between an experienced, sensible woman of color and a nutty, egotistical ex-President who thinks he won the last election.
The article appeared before the editorial decision. It reads like a rebuttal.
It begins:
Donald Trump debuted a name for his idiosyncratic, digressive speaking style this summer: “the weave.”
The Republican presidential nominee, now 78, was frustrated with news coverage describing his speeches as rambling and speculating about cognitive decline, according to people who have talked with him, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Trump decided to brand his habit of going off on wide-ranging tangents as the mark of a vibrant and sophisticated mind, they said — trying to turn what many voters, and some of his advisers, saw as a weakness into a strength.
I call it ‘the weave.’ And some people think it’s so genius. But the bad people, what they say is, ‘You know, he was rambling.’ That’s not a ramble. There’s no rambling. This is a weave. I call it the weave. You need an extraordinary memory because you have to come back to where you started.
Oct. 9 interview with Andrew Schulz on the “Flagrant” podcast
Trump’s recent public appearances have been strikingly erratic, coarse and often confusing, even for a politician with a history of ad-libbing in three consecutive presidential runs, a Washington Post review of dozens of speeches, interviews and other public appearances shows. His speeches have gotten longer and more repetitive compared with those of past campaigns. He promotes falsehoods and theories that are so far removed from reality or appear wholly made up that they are often baffling to anyone not steeped in MAGA media or internet memes.
He jumps more abruptly between subjects and from his script to improvising, sometimes offering what sound like non sequiturs. He occasionally mixes up words or names, and some of his sentences are meaningless or nonsensical. As he has delivered more speeches in October, he has made multiple slip-ups per day. He has become more profane in public.
Many of Trump’s supporters say they enjoy his off-the-cuff commentary, favorably contrasting his speeches with what they usually hear from politicians.
“Just because you don’t like how somebody talks doesn’t mean that you don’t listen to what’s in their head,” said Deanna Borracci, 52, who wore a hat reading “Re-elect that motherf—er” to Trump’s rally in Juneau, Wisconsin, on Oct. 6.
“It doesn’t bother me,” she said of his long speeches and off-the-cuff remarks. “He’s being himself.”
With less than two weeks of campaigning left, Vice President Kamala Harris is increasingly trying to use Trump’s words against him. At rallies, she has started playing clips of him speaking and calling him “unstable and unhinged.”
“He has called it ‘the weave,’” Harris said at a rally on Oct. 19. “But I think we here will call it nonsense.”
Trump’s unusual delivery has inspired comedy routines and armchair diagnoses for years. Long, meandering stemwinders, provocations, brazen falsehoods and blunt language, jokes and insults have distinguished his speeches since he launched his candidacy in 2015 calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.” He has frequently posted all-caps outbursts on social media in the middle of the night, critiqued live television, picked fights with celebrities, and veered off poll-tested political messages in favor of petty, personal grievances. His unscripted appearances generate widespread attention, accomplishing his goal of dominating headlines.
The Republican nominee has scoffed at questions about his age and fitness and challenged Harris’s intelligence.
“I have no cognitive,” he said at a town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 20. “She may have a cognitive problem, but, but there’s no cognitive problem.”
He has regularly mocked Harris for meandering answers she has sometimes given and questioned her intelligence in sometimes sexist ways, people who have been with him privately say. He also accused the press of cherry-picking occasional slip-ups.
For weeks and weeks, I’m up here ranting and raving. Last night, 100,000 people, flawless. Ranting and raving. I’m ranting and raving. Not a mistake. And then I’ll be at a little thing, and I’ll say something, a little bit like ‘the,’ I’ll say, ‘dah,’ they’ll say, ‘He’s cognitively impaired.’ No. I’ll let you know when I will be. I will be someday. We all will be someday, but I’ll be the first to let you know.
Oct. 13 rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona
Trump’s Truth Social posts don’t have anywhere near the reach he once got on Twitter and his rallies are not covered wall-to-wall on live TV, meaning his comments don’t get the traction they once might have. Privately, some of his advisers see this as a positive development. Harris, for her part, has urged people to watch Trump’s rallies for themselves.
Trump would be the oldest person ever elected president. He has never released his medical records or submitted to independent evaluation. The most detailed account of his health came in a January 2019 briefing from White House physician Ronny Jackson, who later resigned under allegations he drank on the job and mistreated subordinates; he now represents a Texas district in Congress. His successor, Sean Conley, gave public accounts of Trump’s health that were rosier than reality when the then-president contracted covid-19 shortly before the 2020 election.
Fifty-one percent of Americans said Trump was too old to work in government in a September Reuters-Ipsos national poll, an identical number as in the same survey in July.
Trump’s advisers reject the notion that Trump has lost a step. He has dramatically increased the pace of campaigning since Labor Day, with multiple events on some days, leaving him appearing more tired and irritable. He has had to suspend his usual golf routine both because of the demands of the campaign and because of security concerns from two assassination attempts and ongoing threats from Iran, according to advisers. He has shown flashes of frustration with those dangers, as well as with his busy schedule, and with having to run against Harris after an aging President Joe Biden withdrew from the race.
Some of his puzzling statements arise from how he gets his own information. In the years since leaving the White House, Trump’s sources of news have grown increasingly insular and self-reinforcing, according to people who talk with him. He both validates and thrives on an alternative ecosystem that selects and amplifies stories to suit him, and he summarily dismisses any other reports as fake. Aides who contradict him or bring him bad news quickly lose his favor and access. Much of the information he gets these days comes from Natalie Harp, a junior but highly influential aide who often trails Trump no matter where he is, printing out supportive articles and social media posts for his review, according to advisers.
For several weeks this fall, campaign advisers tried to persuade him to shorten his speeches. Talk about the economy. Don’t attack people. People would stop leaving, they argued, if his speeches were shorter.
“Going down the stretch, a little discipline would help,” one adviser said.
Trump has dismissed the advice. “People want a show,” he said in Pennsylvania in August, according to a person who heard his comments.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung in an email praised the Republican nominee’s rhetoric: “President Trump is the greatest orator in political history and his patented Weave is a brilliant method to convey important stories and explain policies that will help everyday Americans turn the page from the last four years of Kamala Harris’s failures. The media is too stupid and ignorant to understand or comprehend what is happening in the country and, therefore, is unable to accurately report on President Trump’s achievements while in office and the pro-America agenda he will implement in his second term.”
He repeats falsehoods that are far removed from reality
And then they have the apps, right? How about the apps? Where they have an app so that the gangs, the people, the cartels, the heads of ’em, they can call the app. They call the second-most resettled population. Nobody’s ever seen. They call up the app and they ask, ‘Where do we drop the illegals?’ And people are on the other side, and they left that. She actually created an app, a phone system, where they can call up. I mean, she’s a criminal. She’s a criminal. She really is. If you think about it.
Oct. 11 rally in Aurora, Colorado
Trump’s tendency to boast and exaggerate is well documented, including in more than 30,000 false claims during his presidency, tallied by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. Typical fact checks compare the data Trump is referencing with his characterization. But some of his falsehoods are so fantastical it can be hard to tell what he is referring to.
He accused Harris of speaking “about teddy bears,” which have never come up in any of her interviews. He claimed she was known as “the tax queen” as San Francisco district attorney even though prosecutors have no power over taxation. He falsely claims banning cows and windows are part of Democrats’ plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even accusing them of trying to raze Manhattan. He sometimes vividly describes nonexistent crime sprees.
You go to a lot of cities and they rob a department store and guys are walking out with refrigerators. They have it on their back with two front and air conditioning and everything, and they literally are stripping. And the police are standing outside and they’re shaking out of anger because they really want to do something, but they’re told to stand down, stand down, and they’re watching these criminals walk out.
Oct. 20 town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Trump’s riffs about Hannibal Lecter roughly coincided with false right-wing internet rumors about cannibals from Haiti. He and his campaign have never provided any basis for Trump’s frequent claim that foreign countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions to send people to the United States.
As Trump emphasizes immigration in the closing stretch of the campaign, his speeches routinely feature the false allegation that Harris created a phone app for cartels to coordinate human smuggling at the U.S.-Mexico border. The false claim stems from a mobile application developed and released by Customs and Border Protection during the Trump administration to facilitate trade. In 2023, the agency expanded the app to add appointment scheduling for asylum applications.
Most prominently, Trump promoted unfounded, racist allegations against Haitian refugees settled in Springfield, Ohio, during the Sept. 10 debate with Harris. False internet rumors accused people of eating geese and cats, and Trump, without any basis, added dogs.
He occasionally mixes up words and names
In June, Trump accidentally called his former doctor, Ronny Jackson, Ronny Johnson — ironically in the same breath that he was attacking Biden’s cognitive health and boasting about his own.
At an Oct. 1 news conference in Milwaukee, Trump complained that the Secret Service was busy protecting the U.N. General Assembly, including “the president of North Korea, who’s basically trying to kill me,” apparently meaning Iran.
At the same appearance, Trump mistook Afghan attacks on coalition forces, known in NATO as “green on blue,” for “blue on brown and brown on blue.”
At a rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona, on Oct. 13, Trump struggled to pronounce the word “Assyrians,” sounding like “Azurasians.”
At an Oct. 5 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump appeared to struggle to summon the name of Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, while also falsely claiming that Harris helped start the “defund the police” movement.
She was one of the founders of ‘defund the police.’ And she still believes that. By the way, I don’t know how anybody could, but she still believes that. And if she ever had a chance, there’s a good possibility you should go back to it. Can you imagine, somebody’s robbing our house? ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.’ That’s what they had. They say, there’s not — you know, they tried it. And you know where they tried it? In Minnesota, with our … vice president. And it wasn’t working out too well. It was working out very well for the robbers and the criminals. That’s the only one it was working out well for.
Oct. 5 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania
This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they want it to land or he gets the engines back. That was the first I really saw. I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’ I saw engines about three or four years ago. These things were coming. Cylinders, no wings, no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean, someplace with a circle. Boom. Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right? He’d have eight circles and he couldn’t fill them up. But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote. I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the circles. I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful. That was so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person that did them, that was the best thing about his — the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t get people, so they used to have the press stand in those circles because they couldn’t get the people. Then I heard we lost. ‘Oh, we lost.’ No, we’re never going to let that happen again. But we’ve been abused by other countries. We’ve been abused by our own politicians, really, more than other countries. I can’t blame them. We’ve been abused by people that represent us in this country, some of them stupid, some of them naive, and some of them crooked, frankly.
Oct. 10 speech to the Detroit Economic Club
In an Oct. 7 interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump claimed he had visited Gaza. There is no evidence he has ever been to the territory, and a campaign official later clarified he was referring to Israel, which does not encompass Gaza.
During a town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 14, Trump incorrectly named Election Day as Jan. 5 instead of Nov. 5. (Back in February, he misstated the date of Michigan’s primary as Nov. 27 instead of Feb. 27.) The Oaks town hall ended with 39 minutes of Trump swaying and dancing to music after two people fainted and he decided to stop taking questions.
In an Oct. 21 news conference in Asheville, North Carolina, Trump answered a question about climate change using the French term “double entendre,” which means a phrase with a second meaning, usually sexual. He appeared to mean “double standard.”
We weren’t losing jobs. We weren’t in terms of climate change. Because when you look at the rest of the world and you look at China and you look at the fact that they spent no money on climate change — I mean, John Kerry goes over and speaks to President Xi and they say ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ him. And they laugh at him as he leaves and they do what they’re doing. We spend a lot of money in this country. You know, we have a — it’s a double, it’s a double entendre.
Oct. 21 news conference in Asheville, North Carolina
Trump’s rallies often include a shout-out to the superfans who frequently camp out to be first in line for his rallies, known as the “Front Row Joes.” On Oct. 22 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump mistakenly called them the “Front Row Jacks.” He repeated “Front Row Jacks,” then seemed to catch himself by adding, “and Joes.”
Trump repeatedly interrupted that speech to point to someone in the crowd, asking if he was someone he had met yesterday. The man shouted back, “No, you haven’t met me, but I LOVE you, man!”
Almost two hours into the Greensboro rally, Trump struggled to summon the word “fryer” two days after visiting a McDonald’s restaurant in Pennsylvania.
“Those french fries were good,” he said. “They were good. They were right out of the uh, they were right out of whatever the hell they make them out of.”
He transitions abruptly, verging on non sequiturs
During an Oct. 10 speech at the Detroit Economic Club, Trump described watching a SpaceX landing and said it reminded him of “the Biden circles that he used to have.” Trump was alluding to small-scale campaign events that Biden held during the pandemic to accommodate social distancing, with people seated in spaced-out circles painted on a parking lot — claiming that was evidence that Biden could not have beaten him in the election. The reference would not be obvious based on Trump’s description alone, without already being familiar with the image from four years ago.
Trump often delivers speeches in conversation with his own text, ad-libbing asides and reacting in real time to his own statements as he reads them. Sometimes he switches back and forth between improvising and reading the script or teleprompter without warning, leading to abrupt or jarring transitions.
At an Oct. 1 news conference in Milwaukee billed as a speech about education policy, Trump jumped off from that topic to compare the United States’ performance to other countries, compare states, complain about transgender athletes and immigration, return to other countries and states, attack California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), misrepresent a California law preventing localities from imposing stricter voter ID requirements than the state, and accuse Democrats without evidence of cheating in elections. He then returned to his script about schools without any verbal signal or change in his affect.
Five days later, in Juneau, Wisconsin, Trump swerved off topic based on two distinct meanings of the word “mandate.”
The only way to avoid this miserable fate for America is if Wisconsin and the entire Midwest turn, and I mean turn out in record numbers. We need — and I hate to use this word, ’cause they should have never done it with respect to covid, they should have never done it. But for this, we need a mandate. They shouldn’t have done it with covid. Everybody that did it should be ashamed of themselves what they did. But we need a mandate in the vote, and we’re going to get it.
Oct. 6 rally in Juneau, Wisconsin
In an Oct. 15 Bloomberg News interview, editor John Micklethwait asked whether the Justice Department should break up Google as a monopoly. Trump, appearing to react to the mention of the Justice Department, responded by complaining about a new lawsuit to prevent systematic voting roll purges within 90 days of an election.
“The question is about Google, President Trump,” Micklethwait said.
That night, at a rally in Atlanta, Trump dwelled on the word “kickback” to toggle between making fun of Harris for reading a teleprompter and accusing the administration of corruption. (A week later, at a rally in Greensboro, Trump called the same phenomenon with teleprompters a “snap back.”)
She was talking about 32 days, Mr. Congressman. 32. She goes, ‘And the election will be in 32 days. Thirty-two days.’ The teleprompter crashed. Thirty-two — she kept going. I would have loved to — you know, it kicked back in. It’s called a kickback. Like some people know a lot about a kickback. It’s called a kickback. They know in this administration. But no, it’s a kickback, it kicks back in. And it did kick back in just in time because she was about ready to eat the guy.
Oct. 15 rally in Atlanta
He has started routinely comparing his various tax proposals to the invention of the paper clip. During an Oct. 21 rally, he made the comparison while talking about exempting car loan interest from taxes.
Sounds simple, right? But it’s not so simple. I always say it’s like the paper clip. You know, some guy 129 years ago, he came up, he took a little piece of stuff, and he went like all of a sudden, the paper clip. He made a fortune. People look at it, they say, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ This is the same thing.
Oct. 21 rally in Greenville, North Carolina
Some of Trump’s speeches can be hard to follow for anyone not already familiar with listening to him, because he uses shorthand for topics as he rapidly jumps through them rather than fully explaining his references. In one answer at the Lancaster town hall, he said “what happened in Afghanistan” to mean the killing of 13 U.S. service members in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport in 2021, and “Russia Russia Russia” to mean special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Our country is really, it’s a failing nation. I don’t care what you say. I mean, we’re not — we’re laughed at all over the world by other leaders four years ago. We were respected by everybody. China, Russia. Russia would have never gone into Ukraine. Israel would have never been attacked on October 7th. We would have never had the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, which is you saw what happened in Afghanistan, the Taliban. We would have never had — think of it. We would have never had Afghanistan. We were getting out, but we were going to get out with dignity and strength, and we were going to keep the big air base, Bagram, because it’s one hour away, spent billions and billions of dollars, just about the biggest, most powerful, longest runways in the world. We gave it to China. They gave it to China. The Chinese now operate it. We were one hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons. We gave it up. Would have never happened. All of these things. We wouldn’t have had inflation because our energy was so good. Energy caused inflation. What they did with energy. But I said to myself, you know, sometimes I think I see, you know, I get hit with all these lunatics that we have with the radical left lunatics where they make up stories about Russia, Russia, Russia. In the end, I wouldn’t change what we’ve done for anything. We’re going to make America great again, greater than ever before.
Oct. 20 town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Some phrases and answers are nonsensical
I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care. It’s — couldn’t — you know, it’s something — you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. And those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care.
Sept. 5 speech at the Economic Club of New York
Some of Trump’s answers in recent interviews and town halls have been particularly obscure. A discussion of his plan for child care included phrases such as “child care is child care,” and there was little more clarity to be found in the answer taken as a whole.
His intent was similarly unclear when he jumped from discussing the border to his support among women during an Oct. 9 rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Four years ago, we had the best border in our country’s history, and that included human trafficking, mostly in women, by the way. That includes — so, when women say, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I like Trump. I was the one — that is the most heinous thing. Human trafficking, mostly in women. Gee, I wonder what that’s all about, right? And then they say, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’m going to’ — Kamala is not going to protect anyone. They’ve allowed this country to be poisoned at our border. And, you know, a lot of people say — and this is not part of the deal, but I’d like to go off the teleprompter, if you don’t mind. I actually haven’t — I don’t think I’ve been on it, shit. I haven’t — they’re waiting for me.
Oct. 9 rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania
At a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 19, Trump said Chinese factories in Mexico would sell cars to the U.S. by going “around the little horn.”
Asked on Oct. 7 how he would advise Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran, Trump repeatedly interrupted himself without finishing or explaining his thoughts. He also referred ambiguously to “the nuclear people.”
No, I said don’t hit the nuclear. Did you ever hear of anyone say don’t hit, he says don’t hit the nuclear. They asked him the other day would you hit, well, I don’t think you should hit the nuclear. I thought it was the opposite, okay? I sort of thought it was the opposite. The nuclear is the biggest single problem the world has. Not global warming, where the ocean will rise one-eighth of an inch in the next 500 years. You know, these people are crazy. The biggest problem we have is nuclear warming, not global warming. And the nuclear people can’t have the nuclear. The nuclear is the power.
Oct. 7 interview with Hugh Hewitt
Sabrina Rodriguez, Marianne LeVine and Hannah Knowles contributed to this report.
