Trump and “The Weave”
No, not his hair.
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, September 3, 2024
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41 comments
Counter points:
- Yes, it is rambling.
- No, it isn’t brilliant.
- No English professors were used in the making of this film.
I guess he gets some side points for being self-aware enough to need a weird lie to explain his rallies?
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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true, but all English professors should sue for defamation.
Well, I’m an English professor, and I think it’s horseshit.
This NYTimes article (no subscription needed) does a pretty decent take down of Trump’s claim.
And:
In the real world, Trump is no longer able to hold the thread of a though together. He can read (woodenly) from a teleprompter, but if he has to ad lib, he is mentally incapable of coherent speech.
“Brilliant” is such a British sort of word. Given that Trump seems to think asylum seekers are people who come from mental asylums, is it out of the realm of plausibility that he thinks “English professor” means a professor from England?
Oh, is this the excuse for the “no one eats bacon anymore because of wind power” nonsense?
He is so inexplicably awful.
… or as Gary Cohn, former White House Economic Advisor said back in 2018, ‘Trump has the I.Q. of an inbred tanning bed ‘
To be fair, Gary Cohn was not an English Teacher at Goldman Sachs.
Speaking of inbred tanning beds, JD Vance would seem to be a go-to person on this. Or maybe he’s expert on inbred sectional sofa units.
@CSK: Well, I know people who do it (some of my students used to compliment me on it, others merely complained that I was confusing), and the ability to has to do with what’s called associative thinking but I’ve not seen the trait in the snippets of Trump speeches I’ve heard nor was it a feature of his speaking patterns I’ve heard from his past life as a reality show star.
@al Ameda: I don’t know that what you said is true. Back in the day, Goldman Sachs had a positively amazing creative writing department. 😉
I’ll just point out that Mark Liberman, linguist, disagrees with this assessment, and thinks there’s at least something interesting with Trump’s speech patterns. I think the biggest issue is that Trump is a bullshitter, and doesn’t, as such, have a specific goal with any of his speeches, which makes tying things together easier. In reading the transcript that was provided, I found it oddly compelling, but I couldn’t have told you what the point was, which turned out to be what had happened at Arlington Cemetery.
@al Ameda:
@just nutha:
In his memoir, Asimov relates a story where his friend, John Ciardi, on telling somoene he’s a poet, gets asked whether he’s self employed. Asimov told him he should have answered “No. I’m a research poet at General Electric.”
It’s all low energy. He can’t be bothered to do preparation and he never has.
There was a Mexican comic named Mario Moreno, better known by his stage name Cantinflas. His trademark was long rambling speeches that were funny in themselves but said little of substance. This led to the neologism cantinflear, which means to make long, rambling speeches with little or no substance, not necessarily funny. Politicians are often accused of engaging in this practice.
In one of his movies, “A Day With The Devil,” he plays an inept army draftee who winds up as an aide to a general. He accidentally substitutes a recorded speech by his boss with one he recorded as a lark, and the radio station winds up playing it. This being a comedy, the speech is a huge success, and he gets tasked with talking up the (unspecified) war.
I’ll try to translate a bit. it’s not easy:
“It’s not for me to say, nor for you to hear it, and it’s not gossip, either, but we’re at war. Why are we at war? Anybody? No? Well, I’ll tell you, we’re at war, as I said before, and it’s good of me to say it and great for you to understand it, we’re at war because we already are.”
I rate that as far more cogent than El Weirdo’s rambling, but then Cantinflas had to be funny (at that, I picked the part that was easiest to translate).
Trump looks like a Boris Johnson impersonator in that photo.
@Kathy:
Brilliant.
You just can’t make this stuff up anymore.
Actually, I have been wondering about his hair. He’s styling it differently, and I was musing about the reason. It looks like he’s growing out hair on the top of his head.
Give out the side points however you wish, but is it “self-awareness” when you hear of people mocking you and then have a reason easily at hand for why you are right and they are wrong? Self-awareness requires reflection. Trump doesn’t do reflection because (like a vampire) his image doesn’t appear in mirrors.
@Kevin:
I won’t dispute that.
But there are a lot of disastrous, messy things that can be said to be interesting in one way or the other.
@just nutha:
Is that snark or a factual comment on Goldman Sachs marketing?
@al Ameda:
You’d think by now some tech company would have a department of electropoetics and applied literature.
@Kevin: I have tended to shy away from describing what Trump says as word salad. I think Liberman is maybe on to something. However, I would probably not describe it as brilliant. But then, I wouldn’t necessarily describe Sylvia Plath as brilliant, either.
The whole breaking off in the middle of something does something valuable, though. It lets listeners fill in with their own thoughts.
And yes, there is an end product to these utterances: Hate Democrats, Love Trump. It’s a simple message. Ronald Reagan invented “government *is* the problem”, which was a banner that unified everyone that had any grievance against the government.
With Trump, though, there’s no unifying theme, just a laundry list. Trump’s base does not want a “Hate Government” message, since they depend on Medicare and Social Security (and police pensions, etc.). So instead its the laundry list, and he just sticks it all in in a way that many of them found entertaining. The schtick is getting tired, though.
And to counter that, he’s getting more and more hyperbolic. To wit the prior post about going to school and coming home with a gender change. (That is a riff for the anti-trans crowd. He’s patching – or “weaving” – that in.) Hyperbole has limits, where it stops being “colorful” and is merely tiresome.
@Kathy: On Saturday Night Live, James Austen Johnson has been playing Donald Trump in a manner much like the way you describe Maria Moreno. If you haven’t seen him he’s definitely worth a look.
@Kathy: This aside reminds me of The Eyre Affair and associated universe.
@MarkedMan:
I’ll look at it when I get home.
@TJ:
The aside is just a matter of treating the arts as sciences, mostly for a chuckle (I’m sure they don’t rate a laugh).
So, that should have been “applied quantum literature.”
@Kathy:
Oh, I’m following – It is just that Fforde’s Eyre Affair is great fluffy genre fiction where such jobs would be real and of consequence! I can never resist recommending his books.
@MarkedMan:
James Austin Johnson does a great impression in terms of voice and mannerisms, but his Trump character is often somewhat sympathetic, with thoughtful musings and clever jabs at his family and minions. I don’t know why he does that nonexistent side of Trump instead of, say, his tendency to constantly bullshit about every big and little thing.
@Skookum: Trump, in pictures going back to his childhood in the military school has always worn a pompadour hairstyle, most often one that was called a D.A. (for duck “tail”) back in the 50s. So yes, he’s growing the hair long out of the top of his head and combing it mostly toward the back. He’s very fortunate to have a head that went bald tonsure style so that he still has significant hair top front and doesn’t look like a pathetic old guy trying to disguise that he’s bald.
@gVOR10: I have never done any investment through Goldman Sachs, so that comment and any others I might make in the future are based on my perspective of second-hand information and should not be taken for intimate knowledge of the workings of Goldman Sachs or investment banking at large.
@Eusebio: I guess I see it a little differently. To me Johnson has been portraying Trump the same way since before SNL, and has consistently focused in on the old riffing-on-any-subject Trump, where the ex-President is completely swimming in his own stream consciousness, and you can see the random word associations taking him from on thing to another. Here’s an example of him doing Trump’s take on Scooby Doo. It used to be that Trump would start off with a political attack and then meander onto something like a Scooby critique, but now it is the opposite, as handlers and interviewers try to get him to off the angry poor-poor-me train and he doesn’t even last a whole sentence.
Now that Trump is in a constant state of anger and negativity, it will be interesting to see if Johnson adapts his bit.
@Kevin:
Mark Liberman is impressed that Trump can make ten minutes of babble seem coherent? The weave, huh? I improvise 400 page books and weave together five different plot threads and a dozen characters and it all comes together. Then I do it with a whole 2500 page series. And hell, I’m high half the time. Pff.
ETA: And BTW, uber liberal Stephen King does it faster.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
This is sarcasm, right?
@Mikey: Given that I’ve brushed my hair back (too little left of it to comb effectively) and have almost none left on the top, meh, not so much. But if you took offense for some reason, my apologies. Beyond that, Trump frequently brags about his hair; he must have some insecurities/prejudices about baldness vis a vis masculinity. (As do the guys who joke “it’s not a bald spot, it’s a solar panel for a sex machine,” at least in my take.)
@Michael Reynolds: We all already know that you are the most prolific and imaginative author the world will ever know. You shouldn’t have to try to compete with Trump as hard as you seem to.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Trump raped Ivana in a rage because the scalp reduction surgeon she recommended did what Trump considered a botched job on him. He clearly had hair loss fears beck then.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Context, not competition.
@Michael Reynolds: potayto/potahto. ETA: Everything is context and perception.
@CSK:
No, profe; you KNOW it’s horseshit.
@DeD:
I do indeed.
@Kathy:
Oh, baby. I now need new business cards…
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I didn’t take offense, it’s just that Trump is basically a perfect exemplar of an old guy trying to disguise his baldness and has been for years, if not decades.
@TJ: I especially loved the episode where Pamela has a flat tire on her bike near someone’s house in the Literature-verse and has to hang around for two weeks because all the communications with the bike repair service are being carried out via handwritten letters…
@Grumpy Realist: Is that from Well of Lost Plots? Fforde folds in so many literary references. Never actually read “Pamela; or…” before, though I understand the link!