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.
I can’t say I watch a lot of trump speaking (because I heard enough of that guy long ago). However, the few clips I’ve seen on trumps rambling feel like he’s trying to gain resonance with his audience (and failing). You can see pieces of this that worked for him during the the 2016 run. He’d mention some side topic, pause and watch for audience reaction, and if they responded favorable, he’d double down with a followup remark on that same topic. It many times came off looked semi-planned that that was where he was going to take the speech anyway back then even if that wasn’t the case.
These days it looks like he’s fishing for an audience response, gets none, sometimes switches back to the original topic, doesn’t get a response, fishing again, no response, fishing again, no response, repeat. Its like he blew threw his good material, and is grabbing desperately for something his audience will cheer for. Chasing a dopamine hit of people cheering for what he is saying…and not getting it. I think this is also why he’ll occasionally bring up Obama or Hillary because those (in campaigns now long past) hit his crowd very well. Where now those old reference just confuse his audience because they’re not relevant to any political discussions today, but trump isn’t saying any of this for political effect, but just to hear a crowd cheer for him so that doesn’t figure into his immediate thought process.
Yes, that’s what I see, that’s clearly what he’s doing. The difference is that in 2016, he was able to retain in long-term memory what didn’t work, and had the mental flexibility to try out new bits to find things that did. Now, he keeps going back to the same dry well over and over again, in every speech, which is evidence that he’s losing it. (As further evidence, I’d point out that this is consistent with the amount of time it took him to grasp that he wasn’t running against Biden anymore.)