Why Not?: Bragging & Weaving

This is the third in a series of posts on the reasons I will not be voting to return the former president to the White House. My focus here is not to support his opponent but instead to explain why I believe that Donald Trump is manifestly unqualified for the role.

One of the ways you can tell when you've stumbled onto someone's trigger issues is their repeated attempts to explain and/or excuse that behavior. In my case, it's self-deprecating jokes about my board game collection. (While I love playing board games, I still feel a little bit like a teenager who still wants to play with blocks & Lincoln Logs sometimes - worrying about what other folks think about my "juvenile" hobby.)

Bragging

For the former president, the most obvious trigger is crowd size. From the patently ridiculous "my inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama's crowd size" in January of 2017 to his debate behavior in September 2024, questioning the size of his audience has been a sure-fire way to produce a response. It's even continued with recent lies about being forced to turn 50k people away in Wisconsin:

In Waunakee and again in Milwaukee, Trump claimed 50,000 to 60,000 people were turned away from his Saturday rally in Prairie du Chien. About a thousand people were standing in line to get into the rally, but the auditorium sat somewhere near 300 people. Crawford County, where Prairie du Chien is located, has a population of about 16,000.

The rally was initially planned to be held outdoors but switched to indoors over Secret Service staffing concerns. The agency was responsible for securing the United Nations General Assembly summit in New York on the same day.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 10/1/24

Weaving

Another trigger point for Mr. Trump is descriptions of his campaign rally speeches as rambling, disjointed, and/or a "word salad buffet" (credit to his former communications director, Anthony Scaramucci). In late August, the former president responded with a creative explanation:

"...you know I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I'll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together. And it's like -- and friends of mine that are like English professors, they say, "It's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen." But the fake news, you know what they say? "He rambled." That's not rambling when you have -- what you do is you get off a subject to mention another little tidbit, then you get back onto the subject, and you go through this, and you do it for two hours, and you don't even mispronounce one word."
Donald Trump (rally in Johnstown, PA 8/30/24)

Setting aside the obvious nonsensical lie about his friends who are English professors (the Trump campaign refused to name any of these professors when asked by the New York Times), I'll note that as I am an actual English major (B.A. in English, Baylor University 1986 - with a particular focus on the works of John Steinbeck), to me "the weave" sounds dangerously like an excuse for meandering circumlocutory wanderings through the corners of the speaker's mind.

I'm reminded of this classic bit from season 7 (admittedly, the low point in the series) of Gilmore Girls:

The former president sounds somewhat like Lorelai Gilmore when attempting to answer a question about inflation:

It is probably the question I get most. They say you’re going to vote with your stomach. I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but it’s a little bit true. And groceries, food has gone up at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. We’ve never seen anything like it, 50, 60, 70%. You take a look at bacon and some of these products and some people don’t eat bacon anymore, and we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down… 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. This was caused by energy. This was really caused by energy and also their unbelievable spending. They’re spending us out of wealth. Actually, they’re taking our wealth away, but it was caused by energy. And what they’ve done is they started cutting way back. We were in third place. When I left, we were by far in first place beating Russia, beating Saudi, Arabia, and we were going to dominate to a level that we’ve never seen before. And then we had a bad election. I’ll be very nice. I’m supposed to be nice when I talk about the election because everybody’s afraid to talk about, “Oh, please sir don’t talk about the election, please.” If you can’t talk about a bad election, you really don’t have a democracy if you think about it, right? But what they did, Tulsi, is they took back the oil production, the oil started going crazy. That started the inflation. 

Donald Trump (town hall in La Crosse, WI 9/3/24)

To recap, Mr. Trump's answer was:

• groceries have gone up 50-70%
• people aren't eating bacon any more
• we are going to get energy prices lower (not sure how he made that jump in a single sentence)
• the energy issue is caused by using wind to generate energy
• side comment about how wind isn't a legit energy source
• current administration is causing this by spending too much money
• no, wait a minute, it's energy - because current administration cut back
• digression to talk about how he's not supposed to talk about the 2020 election (which was, in his words, "a bad election")
• returned to complain about reduced oil production
• blamed the start of inflation on reduced oil production

He goes on to talk  about ANWR and oil production and finally slides to a finish with promising the questioner that if he's elected, "We’re going to become the energy capital of the world. We’re going to pay down our debt, and we’re going to reduce your taxes still further, and your groceries are going to come tumbling down, and your interest rates are going to be tumbling down. And then you’re going to go out. You’re going to buy a beautiful house, okay? You’re going to buy a beautiful house that’s called the American Dream. The American Dream."

So, inflation leads to bacon to energy production to wind farms to oil to the 2020 election to oil to inflation to ANWR to economic nirvana to buying the American dream. 

Monkey monkey underpants.

A question about the cost of child care provoked a similar response:

But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I'm talking about, that because - look, child care is child care - 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. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we're talking about, including child care.

Donald Trump (talk with Economic Club of New York 9/5/24)

More monkeys, more underpants. And more "tariffs are the magic bullet that solves everything." Sheesh.

The New York Times did an extensive article on how his speeches are becoming increasingly more angry and more rambling, using one campaign rally stop as an example:

He does not stick to a single train of thought for long. During one 10-minute stretch in Mosinee, Wis., last month, for instance, he ping-ponged from topic to topic: Ms. Harris’s record; the virtues of the merit system; Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement; supposed corruption at the F.D.A., the C.D.C. and the W.H.O.; the Covid-19 pandemic; immigration; back to the W.H.O.; China; Mr. Biden’s age; Ms. Harris again; Mr. Biden again; chronic health problems and childhood diseases; back to Mr. Kennedy; the “Biden crime family”; the president’s State of the Union address; Franklin D. Roosevelt; the 25th Amendment; the “parasitic political class”; Election Day; back to immigration; Senator Tammy Baldwin; back to immigration; energy production; back to immigration; and Ms. Baldwin again.

description by New York Times (transcript of full rally)

Linguist John McWhorter noted in an interview with NPR that the former president may have a method to this verbal madness - but not an emotionally healthy one.

The idea that Trump has that what he's doing is this kind of jaunty character trait called the weave is interesting. And he's not completely out of his mind on that, in that most of us are not as organized in how we manage topics in the heat of a casual conversation. I mean, casual speech is much less tidy than we often think. But when I listen to Trump, what I hear is a kind of verbal narcissism. And what I mean by that is that very often, the connection between point A and point B is something that's very difficult to understand. You have to almost parse it as if it was something in the Talmud, whereas it makes sense to him.

In other words, he can't be bothered to make the connection for us. He's not speaking to us, trying to communicate with us in any real way beyond, you know, the very primal aspect of it. He could be this way at 25. There are people who talk that way at 20. I don't think it's dementia. I think that it's a more elemental problem with his nature, which perhaps has gotten worse as he's gotten older, but I think it's less a matter of his aging than the fact that he knows he can get away with it.

John McWhorter (interview with NPR 9/13/24)

Other commentators have noted that his performance at these rallies is showing signs of cognitive decline:

“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.”...

"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.
Timothy O'Brien (quoted in The Guardian)

...just a few days after attacking Harris as “a very dumb person,” Trump held an event in Wisconsin in which he struggled to pronounce United Arab Emirates, flubbed the basics of hurricane season, mixed up Iran with North Korea, falsely claimed government agencies can’t determine the U.S. population, and referred to an African country before concluding, “I don’t know what that is.”

A Washington Post report told readers soon after, “Trump, 78, often speaks in a digressive, extemporaneous style that thrills his fans at large-scale rallies. But Tuesday’s event, in front of almost entirely reporters, was especially scattered and hard to follow.”

commentary from MSNBC (video of full rally speech)

Final Thoughts

Both of these trigger points are indicators of greater issues - an inability to focus, a narcissistic outlook on the world, and the possibility of mental & emotional decline.

I was personally willing to oppose hiring an individual with narcissistic tendencies to serve as a part-time worship pastor , even as it led to twenty-four hours of professional mediation and my eventual resignation from that church. I cannot possibly support someone with those same tendencies to occupy the the position of the President of the country I love.

Finally, if you doubt what I'm saying (or what the "lamestream media" is saying), I'd strongly suggest you spend some time watching and/or reading the transcripts from Mr. Trump's rallies over the past couple of months. It's easy to do thanks to the website, Rev.

Important reminder: I am not attempting to defend the Biden administration or the Harris candidacy. I am simply pointing out that the obvious issues of narcissism and scattered thinking/speaking by Donald Trump do not deserve and will not receive my support.

The first post in this series focuses on tariff policy - at this point, Mr. Trump's belief that tariffs are a "magic wand" that can cure all sorts of problems - child care, grocery prices, bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., etc. They're not.

The second post in this series focuses on immigration policy - the dehumanizing language, the abject lies, and the unbelievably foolish promises of mass deportation.