For those baffled by Donald Trump’s forays into meandering discourses about electrocution, bacons 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 look like incoherent ramblings as he frequently departed from his scripted speech were instead indicators of his brilliance that impressed other great minds.
“I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that 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,’” he told a bemused audience.
“But the fake news, you know what they say, ‘He rambled.’ It’s not rambling. What you do 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.”
But, increasingly, many others are not persuaded, including some of his own supporters.
Trump has a long history of deviating from written speeches as the words on the autocue fire up disparate thoughts and digressions he then pursues and embellishes. But Timothy O’Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, said that Trump’s’s manner of public speaking is now the subject of scrutiny and disquiet over his mental acuity – in some of the same ways that Joe Biden faced and that ultimately cost him his re-election bid.
What we’re seeing now is a reflection of someone who’s very troubled and very desperate
Tim O’Brien
“The reason he’s now offering these convoluted explanations of his speech patterns in his public appearances is because he’s hyper-aware that people have noted that he’s making even less sense than he used to,” he said. “What we’re seeing now is a reflection of someone who’s very troubled and very desperate.”
Recent examples of Trump’s claim to be weaving together complex explanations include repeated references to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibal serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, while 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 makes the leap to talk about the sociopath he calls the “late, great Hannibal Lecter” who, at one rally, he bewilderingly described as “a wonderful man”.
Last week in Wisconsin, Trump was asked what he would do “to make life more affordable and bring down inflation”. He turned the question into another opportunity to rail against green energy as he theorised that Biden’s expansion of wind power had driven up the cost of electricity and increased inflation. This in turn, said Trump, put the cost of bacon beyond the reach of many ordinary Americans.
“You take a look at bacon and some of these products and some people don’t eat bacon any more. 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,” he said.
There’s no evidence that these things are linked other than in Trump’s head. Besides, demand for bacon hasn’t fallen significantly. Trump has previously claimed that wind farms are driving whales “batty”.
To O’Brien it is classic Trump because he uses digressions, piled high with false claims, as a means to avoid proper scrutiny.
“He’s a serial liar and a serial fabulist. So much of that comes out that by the time you start to fact-check a statement or a tale, eight others have already landed. I don’t think it’s strategic, I just think it’s Trump being Trump. It protects him from greater accountability because it wears people down trying to keep up with him,” he said.
Jennifer Mercieca, a professor specialising in political rhetoric at Texas A&M University and author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, said that Trump regards his meanderings as a strength to the point of publicly belittling his advisers who tell him not to do it.
“He sees himself as someone who is unscripted and not teleprompted, and a freewheeling conversationalist. He wants to be able to feed off the crowd. Another part of it is that his brain is not well-disciplined and it might also just be that he’s unable to maintain a thought and carry it through to his logical conclusion,” she said.
However, Mercieca said that Trump was aware that his digressions are increasingly drawing questions about his mental fitness to be president again – the charge he once made against Biden. That, she said, 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 putting a marketing spin on anything that might be perceived as a negative. He’s had a lot of criticism lately for rambling, for being low energy during his rallies, for failing to read the teleprompter properly, mispronouncing words and so his response is to spin it. He says, ‘I have experts, these friends of mine, unnamed others, who are very impressed with my ability to weave,’” she said.
Trump’s speeches also appear all the more disorderly because they are no longer in contrast to Biden’s faltering campaign but compared with a far more coherent Democratic presidential candidate in Kamala Harris. O’Brien said that what might once have been an asset for Trump has become increasingly self-defeating.
“It’s certainly doing more harm than good right now because he no longer has the foil of Joe Biden to bounce off of. Biden had become so visibly diminished and the media was more ready to take Biden to task on it on a regular basis. That allowed Trump to skate by. Now that he has a different, younger, more acute and vibrant political opponent, I think it does for him because he now often looks ridiculous or unhinged, unfocused or very, 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 speculated that an electric-powered boat would sink 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 tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?” he told the crowd.
Trump said he asked the boat 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 shark.
“I will 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 an indication of the cleverness of his thinking and then told the audience that he’d rather be electrocuted than fall victim to the shark before returning to his original point – that he doesn’t like electric vehicles.
“So we’re going to end that, 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 on the shark, it only prompted him to double down by explaining what he meant at another rally.
“You heard my story in the boat with the shark, right? I got killed on that. They thought I was rambling. 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, had three different degrees and, you know, so I have an aptitude for things. You know, there is such a thing as an aptitude.”
Then Trump retold the shark and battery story.
To some, the former president does little more than unleash a torrent of disconnected thoughts. Others see a logic to his performance in which a coherent pattern of thought can be discerned by joining up the points he is making between digressions.
O’Brien, who has described Trump as using his rallies as a therapy session to work out his emotional and psychological issues on stage, said that it would be a mistake to try to make too much sense from his speeches.
“To try to discern a method in his madness is a fool’s errand. He is someone who is so narcissistic and privileged that he’s willing to stand up in front of large crowds and essentially free-associate about whatever crosses his mind. It 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 as him offering a menu of public policy choices or real world solutions to their fundamental problems. It’s simply because they feel they’re invited into this world through these nonsensical, nonlinear bits of performance art.”
