John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics who writes frequently for the New York Times. In this column, he reviews Trump’s claim that he knows exactly what he is doing when he jumps from topic to topic, sometimes in the same breath. Trump said he was “weaving” and said that his oratorical style was “brilliant.”
Donald Trump’s word-salad oratory has always been a distinctive feature of his public life, leaving some observers to grasp for a novel way to describe it. Last week Trump himself gave it a name, one that sounds kind of like a ’70s dance: “the weave.”
“You know what the weave is?” he asked the crowd at a rally in Johnstown, Pa. “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.’”
I wonder if somewhere in the recesses of his mind, one of those English professors is me.
No friend of his am I (nor an English professor exactly — my field is Linguistics), but I wrote in 2018, in response to speculation even then that Trump was suffering some kind of dementia, that in listening to him we must realize that informal, occasionally jumbled speech is not automatically incoherent.
Consider this much-dissected sample, from back in 2015:
Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at M.I.T.; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, they do a number ….
Franklin Roosevelt would not have been caught dead talking like this in public. But especially with intonation, pacing and context, Trump manages to convey meaning thoroughly in this passage. An audience member could hear that the parts about Wharton and his defensiveness about his intelligence were an extended parenthetical. We know how to navigate those sentences because the truth is that’s how lots of casual conversation goes.
But Trump’s weaving style is still disturbing, because of what it demonstrates about his state of mind.
It’s one thing to overlap topics within a jolly conversation with a friend, when you might laughingly say, “We’re so many layers in!” But to jump around this way at a podium, supposedly on matters of broad public importance, suggests an inability to sustain attention — at least on anything beyond one’s self — which is a quality that so many of the people who have worked with him have confirmed. Presidents are supposed to be able to focus.
If the weave reflects a failure of attention on the part of the speaker, however, it demands an almost burdensome amount of attention for the listener. Especially lately, the connections between one topic and another become ever more murky. Trump lives to a disconcerting degree in his own head and shows no inclination to face outward…
Intimates chewing the fat about things mutually understood get the job done. But Trump, stringing together insights with no outwardly discernible connection, just chews his own fat.
Or bacon. “You take a look at bacon and some of these products,” Trump said at a recent town hall in Wisconsin. “Some people don’t eat bacon anymore. And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down — you know, this was caused by their horrible energy — wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.”
Figuring out how wind power raises the cost of bacon takes some work. As does the connection, in remarks last year, between shark bites and being electrocuted. “If I’m sitting down and that boat is going down and I’m on top of a battery and the water starts flooding in,” Trump said, “I’m getting concerned, but then I look 10 yards to my left and there’s a shark over there, so I have a choice of electrocution and a shark, you know what I’m going to take? Electrocution. I will take electrocution every single time, do we agree?”
It all made perfect sense — to him. Those who care to join him on these journeys are always welcome to do so, welcome to nod along or laugh at the punchlines. But he makes no effort to meet other people where they are.
Speaking effectively means mastering, usually subconsciously, two types of expression: planned and unplanned language. Planned language is public address and most writing; unplanned speech is conversation, texting and the like. Trump is satisfied to cast important addresses as unplanned verbal kaleidoscopy.
Flouting the codes of planned language is boorish to some, relatable to others. But it’s more than a matter of style. It’s a refusal to think ahead or consider the perspective of others, things we should rightly expect our leaders to do. Presidents should have a responsibility to speak outwardly and above, communicating to and for us, not just to themselves. Trump’s “weave” can be amusing, but it is yet another attribute that proves him — almost every time he opens his mouth — to be unfit for office.
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