Washington Post Finally Notices Donald Trump Talks Kind Of Weird
But he says it's a brilliant strategy called 'the weave,' so let's take that seriously, mmm-hmm.
The Washington Post published a Very Serious Article yesterday (gift link) about Donald Trump’s “idiosyncratic, digressive speaking style” and his insistence that it’s a deliberate rhetorical strategy he calls “the weave,” although many experts call it “Jesus fucking Christ, he’s gotten a lot worse, hasn’t he?”
This is from the same paper that published daily articles, often more than one any given day, after Joe Biden’s pretty bad performance in his June debate with Trump.
The only reason the Post hasn’t come in for more criticism is that it couldn’t hope to match the frenzied pace of the New York Times. In the period between the debate and Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, the Times published enough “Biden is old and feeble” takes that if they were pulverized to a fine powder and shot into the stratosphere, global warming might be substantially slowed. Trust us, we did the math.
Of course yesterday it also came out that The Post would not be, for the first time in a very long time, endorsing among the candidates, one of whom is a competent youngish Black woman and the other of whom is apparently having long articles written about his sundowning, in the Washington Post. This has led many of you to be very angry and withhold your money in the marketplace of ideas. This is your right.
The Post appears to have learned at least a little from the Times, which in September embarrassed itself in its own examination of the possibility that Trump is old and sundowning. It was a decent enough look at Trump’s incoherent word salads, but it nevertheless ended up sanewashing Trump by partially quoting one of his rants — right after a paragraph bemoaning that practice.
The Post mostly avoids that trap by quoting Trump at length, with video, and explaining some of the weird references that seem to be shorthand for rightwing conspiracy theories that nobody would know if they didn’t obsessively follow the same crazy outlets Trump does.
The article also provides plenty of examples of lies Trump seems to pull entirely out of another dimension, by which we mean his ass. Many are so disconnected from reality that they aren’t even distortions of wingnut media, like Trump’s notion that Democrats want to “ban windows” to fight climate change, or his weirdly detailed accounts of criminals running rampant that exist only in his imagination, like this wholly fictitious example from an October 20 town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
TRUMP: You go to a lot of cities and they rob a department store and guys are walking out with refrigerators. They have it on their back with two front and air conditioning and everything, and they literally are stripping. And the police are standing outside and they’re shaking out of anger because they really want to do something, but they’re told to stand down, stand down, and they’re watching these criminals walk out.
It has to be true, the former president of the United States saw it on the TV that plays only in his head.
As a catalogue of Trump’s recent sundowning, it’s really not a bad article; it even places Trump’s verbal flights of flatulence into a few categories: “He occasionally mixes up words and names,” “Some phrases and answers are nonsensical,” and so on, all with plenty of examples.
We especially enjoyed “I have no cognitive,” also from the Lancaster town hall. “She may have a cognitive problem, but, but there’s no cognitive problem.”
And this is damnably relatable, damn it: Two days after his stint cosplaying as a fry cook at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, Trump couldn’t for the life of him bring to mind the word “fryer.”
“Those french fries were good,” he said. “They were good. They were right out of the uh, they were right out of whatever the hell they make them out of.”
Sounds like my own occasional blanks when trying to get the right word, although as Obama said the other day about the playlist he’d choose if he gave up on a town hall and did a 40-minute dance party instead, my temporarily missing words are much better.
The authors aren’t terribly serious in suggesting there could be anything to that “weave” Trump talks about. The notion that he’s just wowing us with a complex but artful speaking style is undermined simply by quoting the fucker:
“I call it ‘the weave.’ And some people think it’s so genius. But the bad people, what they say is, ‘You know, he was rambling.’ That’s not a ramble. There’s no rambling. This is a weave. I call it the weave. You need an extraordinary memory because you have to come back to where you started.”
The article makes clear he never brings the threads together, and certainly not with anything like the obsessive order he brings to his combover.
But here’s the real problem: The article teases us by hinting at a rigorous analysis of Trump’s deteriorating discourse that never arrives.
Trump’s recent public appearances have been strikingly erratic, coarse and often confusing, even for a politician with a history of ad-libbing in three consecutive presidential runs, a Washington Post review of dozens of speeches, interviews and other public appearances shows. His speeches have gotten longer and more repetitive compared with those of past campaigns. […]
As he has delivered more speeches in October, he has made multiple slip-ups per day. He has become more profane in public.
But the article doesn’t even bother comparing 2024 Trump and any earlier Trump. Ultimately, it’s just a categorized list of stupid shit an aging ex-president says.
That said, there’s at least this nice insight about Trump’s frequent stream-of-stupid departures from the prepared text on his teleprompter:
Trump often delivers speeches in conversation with his own text, ad-libbing asides and reacting in real time to his own statements as he reads them. Sometimes he switches back and forth between improvising and reading the script or teleprompter without warning, leading to abrupt or jarring transitions.
That was pretty good. Heck, we could go all postmodern and say Trump is performing a narcissistic version of Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that all texts and interpreters are in dialogue with others, but it’s Saturday morning and we don’t wanna.
That’s how we suspect the WaPo thing got written too, but on a weekday, bye!
[WaPo (gift link)]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or enter a Burkean conversation with our one-time donation button, only with money.
Reposting and pinning to the top as requested (if you would like to collapse this thread click on the thin grey line to the left.)
Our friend and most excellent Wonker V4Virginia has died from complications following her lobectomy. I considered her a dear friend and she was truly a wonderful human.
Her obituary: https://www.heritageflagler.com/obituaries/Mary-Atkins-17/#!/TributeWall
From Mr. V4Virginia:
https://open.substack.com/pub/v4virginia/p/all-too-real?r=2knfuc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Re the refrigerators, I happen to know exactly how Trump thinks that happened:
Police Chief's office, Day:
MCBAIN pounds desk angrily
MCBAIN: We can't even question a guy carrying a refrigerator on his back, chief?
CHIEF: It's out of my hands, McBain. Orders from HQ.
MCBAIN: Damn those bureaucrats! Don't the Suits know this city's about to explode?
CHIEF (shrugs): You can't fight City Hall, McBain.
MCBAIN: I can't?
MCBAIN racks the slide on his enormous Webley-Vickers 50.80 semiautomatic handgun
MCBAIN: Just watch me!