For those confused by Donald Trump’s rounds of electric shocks, bacon sales or cannibal killers at his recent political rallies, the former US president had an explanation.
Trump assured supporters in Pennsylvania on Saturday that what might seem like an incoherent jumble as he often deviated from the script of his speech were instead signs of his brilliance, impressing other great minds.
“I weave. You know what a weave is? I’m talking about, like, nine different things that all come together brilliantly. And like my friends who are like English professors, they say, ‘That’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,'” she shared to a confused audience.
But fake news, you know what they say, ‘He wandered.’ It’s not wobbly. You go off topic and mention another little tidbit, then you come back to it, go through this and do it for two hours and you don’t even mispronounce a word.”
But increasingly, many others are unconvinced, including some of his own supporters.
Trump has a long history of divergently written speeches, as the words in the autograph evoke different thoughts and deviations, which he then pursues and embellishes. But Timothy O’Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, said Trump’s way of speaking in public is now under scrutiny and uneasiness because of his mental acuity — in a way that Joe Biden faced and that ultimately. cost him his re-election bid.
What we see now is a reflection of someone who is very troubled and very desperate
Tim O’Brien
“The reason he now offers these elaborate explanations for his speech patterns in his public appearances is because he’s very aware that people have found him to be even less sane than before,” he said. “What we’re seeing now is a reflection of someone who is very troubled and very desperate.”
Recent examples of Trump weaving together complex explanations include his repeated references to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibal serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, when he talked about immigration. Trump frequently and falsely claims that foreign governments are emptying their prisons and “insane asylums” to send former residents across the US border to commit crimes. Trump then takes the leap to talk about the sociopath he calls “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” whom he confusingly described as a “wonderful man” at one rally.
Last week in Wisconsin, Trump was asked what he would do to “make life more affordable and slow inflation.” He turned the question into another opportunity to rail against green energy, theorizing that Biden’s expansion of wind power had raised the cost of electricity and fueled inflation. Trump said that, in turn, put the price of bacon out of reach for many ordinary Americans.
“We look at bacon and some of these products, and some people don’t eat bacon anymore. We are going to lower energy prices. When we get energy down, this was because of their terrible energy – wind, they want wind everywhere. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a bit of a problem,” he said.
There is no evidence that these things are connected to anything other than Trump’s head. In addition, the demand for bacon has not significantly decreased. Trump has previously claimed that wind farms drive whales “batty”.
For O’Brien, it’s classic Trump, using digressions filled with false claims as a way to avoid proper scrutiny.
“He’s a serial liar and a serial fabulist. It becomes so much that by the time you start fact-checking a claim or a story, eight others have already gone down. I don’t think it’s strategic, I just think Trump is Trump. It protects him from greater accountability, because it tires people trying to keep up with him,” he said.
Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of political rhetoric at Texas A&M University and author of the book Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, said Trump considers his meandering a strength, to the point where he publicly belittles advisers who tell him not to. it.
“He sees himself as someone who is unscripted and unprompted and a free dialogue. He wants to be able to feed off the crowd. Another part of it is that his brain isn’t very disciplined, and it could also just be that he can’t sustain a thought and take it to its logical conclusion,” he said.
Mercieca, however, said Trump was aware that his exceptions would raise more questions about his mental fitness to run for president again — a charge he once leveled against Biden. He said that has put him on the defensive.
“Donald Trump, while not a good businessman, is very good at marketing and branding, and so he’s very good at marketing anything that can be seen as negative. He’s gotten a lot of criticism lately for walking around, for being low-energy during rallies, for being can’t read the teleprompter properly, mispronounces the words, so his response is to spin it, he says, “I have experts, these friends of mine, nameless others, who are very impressed with my weaving skills,” he said.
Trump’s speeches also seem all the more nonsensical because they are no longer pitted against Biden’s faltering campaign, but against a far more consistent Democratic presidential candidate in Kamala Harris. O’Brien said what was once Trump’s advantage has become increasingly self-defeating.
– It certainly does more harm than good right now, because he no longer has Joe Biden’s foil to bounce off of. Biden had become so visibly diminished and the media was more willing to take Biden to task on a regular basis. This allowed Trump to skate by. “Now that he has a different, younger, sharper and more vibrant political opponent, I think it suits him because he often looks ridiculous now or restless or unfocused or very, very old,” he said.
Trump has a particular obsession with electric vehicles, which he returns to even though it’s not a topic of his speech or debate. He told about a conversation he had with a boat manufacturer at a demonstration in June, where he thought that an electric boat would sink under the weight of the battery. Then he added a shark to the equation.
“I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sinks from its weight and you’re in the boat and you have this hugely powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s about 10 yards away?’ he told the audience.
Trump said he asked the boat’s manufacturer whether it would be better to be in the water next to the boat and risk electrocution from the battery or to swim toward the sharks.
“I’m telling you, he didn’t know the answer,” he told the audience. “He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’
Trump saw this as a sign of the intelligence of his thinking and then told the audience that he would rather be electrocuted than be victimized by a shark, before returning to his original position – that he does not like electric vehicles.
“So we’re going to end it, we’re going to end it for boats, we’re going to end it for trucks,” he said.
When Trump was widely mocked for his musings about sharks, it only made him double down on explaining what he meant at another rally.
“You heard my story in the boat with the shark, didn’t you? I got killed in it. They thought I wandered. I don’t wander,” he said.
“I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for many years, I think the longest tenure ever. Very intelligent, I had three different degrees and you know, so I have a knack for things. You know, there’s such a thing as suitability.”
Trump then retold the story of the shark and the battery.
For some, the former president does nothing more than unleash a stream of unhinged thoughts. Others see the logic of his presentation, where a consistent pattern of thought can be discerned by connecting the points he makes between the deviations.
O’Brien, who has described Trump as using his rallies as a therapy session to work out emotional and psychological issues on stage, said it would be a mistake to try to make too much sense of his speeches.
“Trying to see method in his madness is foolish. He’s someone who’s so narcissistic and privileged that he’s willing to stand in front of large crowds and basically freely engage in anything that pops into his head. That frustrates his political advisers. It frustrates the Republican Party, he said.
“But it appeals to his base, which is somewhere between 25% and 30% of Republican voters, as performance art. Not that he’s offering a range of public policy choices or real solutions to their basic problems. It’s simply because they feel called into this world by these nonsensical, through non-linear elements of performance art.”
