by For those who were struck by Donald Trump’s rants regarding disturbing discourses about electrocution, bacon sales or cannibal killers at his recent political rallies, the former US president had an explanation.
Trump assured Pennsylvania supporters on Saturday that his lights were indicators that other brilliant minds might have seemed like irresponsible ramblings as he often deviated from his scripted speech.
“I do the weaving. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that all come back together wonderfully. And it’s like my friends who are like English professors, they say: ‘That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,’” he told a bemused audience.
“But the fake news, you know what they say, ‘It went on.’ He is not wandering. What you do is you go off topic to mention another little tidbit, then you go back on topic, and you go through and do it for two hours, and not even a word just to pronounce it wrong.”
But, gradually, many others, including some of his own supporters, are not convinced.
Trump has a long history of deviating from written speeches as the words on the car affect ideas and discourse that he then follows and shapes. But Timothy O’Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, said that Trump’s public speaking is now the subject of scrutiny and uneasiness about his mental acuity – in some of the same ways that Joe Biden faced and eventually did. cost of offering him re-election.
What we are seeing now is a reflection of a very troubled and desperate person
Tim O’Brien
“The reason he is now offering these convoluted explanations for his speech patterns in his public appearances is because he knows people have noticed that he is making less sense than he used to ,” he said. “What we are seeing now is a reflection of a very troubled and very desperate person.”
Recent examples of Trump’s claimed weaving of convoluted explanations include repeated references to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibal serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, when talking about immigration. Trump frequently, and falsely, claims that foreign governments are emptying their prisons and “insane asylums” to send the former residents across the US border to commit crimes. Trump then jumps to talk about the sociopath he calls the “great late Hannibal Lecter”, whom he fondly described as a “great man”.
Last week in Wisconsin, Trump was asked what he would do “to make life more affordable and reduce inflation.” He turned the issue into another opportunity to tackle green energy, theorizing that Biden’s expansion of wind power had increased the cost of electricity and increased inflation. This in turn, Trump said, put the cost of bacon beyond many ordinary Americans.
“You look at bacon and some of these products and some people don’t eat bacon anymore. We are going to lower the energy prices. When we reduce energy, you know, it was their terrible energy – the wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow we have a little problem,” he said.
There is no evidence that these things are linked except in Trump’s head. In addition, the demand for bacon has not decreased significantly. Trump has previously claimed that wind farms are driving whales “batty”.
Trump is a classic for O’Brien because he uses digressions, piled high with false claims, as a means of avoiding proper scrutiny.
“He is a serial liar and a serial fabulist. So much turns out that by the time you start fact-checking or a story, eight more have already landed. I don’t think it’s strategic, I think Trump is Trump. It protects him from more accountability because it makes people want to keep up with him,” he said.
Jennifer Mercieca, a professor specializing in political rhetoric at Texas A&M University and the author of Demagogue for President: Rhetorical Genius Donald Trump, said that Trump sees his biases as a strength to publicly contradict his advisers who tell him not to. it.
“He sees himself as unscripted and not tele-motivated, and a free-wheeling conversationalist. He wants to be able to feed the crowd. Another part of it is that his brain is not well disciplined and it could also be that he is not able to hold a thought and bring it to a logical conclusion,” she said.
However, Mercieca said Trump is aware that his progress is drawing more questions about his mental fitness to run for president again — the charge he once made against Biden. That, she said, put him on the defensive.
“Although Donald Trump is not a good businessman, he is very good at marketing and branding, so he is very good at turning marketing around anything that could be seen as negative. He has taken a lot of criticism recently for wandering, for being low on energy during his rallies, for failing to read the telecommunications properly, for mispronouncing words so his response is to turn him. He says, ‘I have experts, these friends of mine, other anonymous people, who are very impressed with my weaving ability,’” she said.
Trump’s speeches are also seen as more disordered because they are no longer contrasted with Biden’s fractious campaign but with a much more coherent Democratic presidential candidate in Kamala Harris. O’Brien said what might once have been an asset to Trump has become more self-serving.
“He’s definitely doing more harm than good right now because he no longer has the Joe Biden foil. Biden had diminished in such visibility that the media was more ready to take Biden to task on a regular basis. That gave Trump a chance to skate. Now that he has a different political opponent, younger, sharper and more energetic, I think it works for him because he often looks ridiculous or unhinged, unfocused or very old,” he said.
Trump has a particular obsession with electric vehicles, a theme he returns to even when it is not the subject of his speech or discussion. At a rally in June he recounted a conversation with a boat manufacturer in which he mentioned that an electric powered boat would go under the weight of the battery. Then he introduced a shark into the equation.
“I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you’re in the boat, and you have this amazingly powerful battery, and the battery is underwater now, and there’s a shark that’s about 10 yards over there?” he said to the crowd.
Trump said he asked the boat’s manufacturer if it would be better to be in the water near the boat and risk electrocution from the battery or swim toward the shark.
“I’ll tell you, he didn’t know the answer,” he told the crowd. “He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.'”
Trump saw this as a demonstration of the cleverness of his thinking and then told the audience that he would rather be electric than fall victim to the shark before returning to his original point – that he does not like electric vehicles.
“So we’re going to eliminate that, we’re going to eliminate it for boats, we’re going to eliminate it for trucks,” he said.
When Trump was widely mocked for his shark comments, he only encouraged him to double down by explaining what he meant at other rallies.
“You heard my story in the boat with the shark, right? I was killed by that. They thought I was wandering. I’m not rambling,” he said.
“I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for many years, I think the longest tenure ever. Very smart, he had three different degrees and, you know, so I have a knack for things. You know, there is such a thing as ability.”
Then Trump told the story of the shark and the battery.
To some, the former president does little more than unleash a torrent of disconnected ideas. Others see a logic to his performance where a clear pattern of thought can be discerned by connecting the points he is making between digressions.
O’Brien, who described Trump as using his rallies as a therapy session to work out his emotional and psychological problems on stage, said it would be a mistake to try to make too much sense of it. his speeches.
“It is a fool’s errand to try to discern method in his madness. He is someone who is so narcissistic and privileged that he is willing to stand up in front of large crowds and basically be a free-associate about whatever crosses his mind. He blocks his political advisers. It hinders the Republican party,” he said.
“But he appeals to his base, which is somewhere between 25% and 30% of Republican voters, as performance art. It is not a choice for public policy to offer real-world solutions to their underlying problems. It’s because they feel invited into this world through these non-material, non-linear pieces of performance art.”
