What if I’m the ‘Friend’ Donald Trump Referred To?

Donald Trump’s word-salad oratory has always been a distinctive feature of his public life, leaving some observers to grasp for a novel way to describe it. Last week Trump himself gave it a name, one that sounds kind of like a ’70s dance: “the weave.”

“You know what the weave is?” he asked the crowd at a rally in Johnstown, Pa. “I’ll talk about like nine different things, and 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.’”

I wonder if somewhere in the recesses of his mind, one of those English professors is me.

No friend of his am I (nor an English professor exactly — my field is Linguistics), but I wrote in 2018, in response to speculation even then that Trump was suffering some kind of dementia, that in listening to him we must realize that informal, occasionally jumbled speech is not automatically incoherent.

Consider this much-dissected sample, from back in 2015:

Franklin Roosevelt would not have been caught dead talking like this in public. But especially with intonation, pacing and context, Trump manages to convey meaning thoroughly in this passage. An audience member could hear that the parts about Wharton and his defensiveness about his intelligence were an extended parenthetical. We know how to navigate those sentences because the truth is that’s how lots of casual conversation goes.

But Trump’s weaving style is still disturbing, because of what it demonstrates about his state of mind.

It’s one thing to overlap topics within a jolly conversation with a friend, when you might laughingly say, “We’re so many layers in!” But to jump around this way at a podium, supposedly on matters of broad public importance, suggests an inability to sustain attention — at least on anything beyond one’s self — which is a quality that so many of the people who have worked with him have confirmed. Presidents are supposed to be able to focus.