debtOr for those confused by Donald Trump’s incoherent ramblings about electrocution, bacon sales and cannibalistic murderers at a recent political rally, the former US president had an explanation.
Trump made it clear to supporters in Pennsylvania on Saturday that while his speeches may often go off script and sound incoherent, it was a sign of the intelligence he has shown to impress other great minds.
“I do weaving. Do you know what weaving is? I talk about nine different things and they all come together and come back together in a beautiful way. And people like my friend, an English professor, say, ‘That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,'” he told the bewildered audience.
“But the fake news is, as the saying goes, ‘He rambled on.’ He doesn’t ramble on. He goes off topic, gives another tidbit of information, then comes back on topic. And he does this for two hours straight, without mispronouncing a word.”
But a growing number of people, including some of his own supporters, are becoming unconvinced.
Trump has a long history of deviating from scripted speeches, as his autocuvées provoke thoughts and asides that he pursues and embellishes. But Timothy O’Brien, author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Becoming the Donald,” says Trump’s oratory style is now subject to scrutiny and anxiety over his intellectual acuity, similar to the conditions Joe Biden faced and ultimately lost his reelection bid.
What we see now is the reflection of someone who is very confused and very desperate.
Tim O’Brien
“The reason he’s giving such a convoluted explanation for the way he speaks in public is because he’s very conscious that people are noticing that he’s saying even more gibberish than he was before,” he said. “What we’re seeing now is the reflection of a very distressed, very desperate person.”
One recent example of Trump’s insistence on weaving together complex narratives was his repeated references to fictional cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lambs” when talking about immigration. Trump has frequently and falsely claimed that foreign governments are emptying prisons and “mental hospitals” and sending former inmates across U.S. borders to commit crimes. Trump then leapt to talking about a sociopath he called “the late Hannibal Lecter,” and at one rally described him, disconcertingly, as “a wonderful person.”
Last week in Wisconsin, Trump was asked what he would do to “make life more affordable and get inflation under control.” He turned the question into another opportunity to blast green energy, theorizing that Biden’s expansion of wind power has driven up electricity prices and fueled inflation, which he said has put the price of bacon out of reach for many ordinary Americans.
“You look at bacon and these products and you see that some people aren’t eating bacon anymore. We’re going to bring down energy prices. If energy prices go down, you see this is caused by their terrible energy, wind. They want the wind to blow everywhere. But if the wind doesn’t blow, we’re in a bit of a problem,” he said.
There’s no evidence that these things are related except in Trump’s head, and demand for bacon hasn’t dropped significantly. Trump has previously claimed that wind farms are driving whales “mad.”
To O’Brien, this is typical Trump tactics, as Trump uses asides laden with false claims as a way to avoid proper scrutiny.
“He’s a habitual liar, a habitual fabricator. There’s so much of that that by the time you start to fact-check a statement or story, there are already eight other statements or stories out there. I don’t think this is a strategic thing, it’s just Trump being Trump. It tires people out trying to keep up with him and it protects him from greater accountability,” he said.
Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of political rhetoric at Texas A&M University and author of “A Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” said Trump sees his off-the-cuff rhetoric as a strength, to the point that he openly scorns advisers who tell him not to.
“He considers himself an unscripted, undirected, free-spirited conversationalist. He wants to enjoy the audience’s reaction. Another reason may be that his brain is not trained enough and he is unable to sustain thoughts and bring them to logical conclusions,” she said.
But Mercieca said Trump is aware that his digressions are increasingly raising questions about whether he’s mentally fit to run for president again — the same accusations he once made against Biden. That, Mercieca said, is putting Trump on the defensive.
“Donald Trump is not a great businessman, but he is good at marketing and branding and putting a marketing spin on things that could be perceived as negative. He’s been criticized recently for his incoherent speeches, his lack of energy at rallies, misreading the teleprompter and mispronouncing words, and his response to that is to spin it. He says, ‘I have friends, I have pundits who I won’t name, who are very impressed with my speaking ability,'” she said.
Trump’s speeches look even more disorganized now that they are being compared not to Biden’s weak campaign but to the far more consistent Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. O’Brien said what was once an advantage for Trump has become increasingly self-defeating.
“Without a Joe Biden challenger, there is certainly more harm than good for now. Biden was visibly declining and the media was ready to criticise him on a regular basis, which helped Trump get by. Now he has a different, younger, sharper and more energetic political opponent which I think is to Trump’s advantage, because now he often looks ridiculous, insane, unfocused and very old,” he said.
Trump has been particularly fixated on electric vehicles, returning to the subject even when it wasn’t the subject of a speech or debate. At a rally in June, he recounted a conversation with a boat manufacturer in which he speculated that an electric boat would sink under the weight of the batteries. Then he brought sharks into the equation.
“I say, ‘What happens if the boat sinks under weight, and you’re on a boat and you’ve got a very powerful battery and that battery goes underwater and there’s a shark about 10 yards away?'” he told the crowd.
Trump said he asked boat manufacturers whether it would be better to stand in the water next to the boat and risk being electrocuted by the batteries, or to swim toward a shark.
“To be honest with you, he didn’t know the answer,” he told the crowd. “He said, ‘You know, nobody has ever asked me that question.'”
Trump took this as a sign of the wisdom of his ideas, telling the audience that he would rather be electrocuted than become food for a shark, before returning to his original claim that he doesn’t like electric cars.
“So we’re going to finish that off. We’re going to finish that off on ships and we’re going to finish that off on trucks,” he said.
Trump was widely mocked for his shark comments, but only drew further criticism at another rally when he explained what he meant.
“You heard my story about the shark encounter on the boat that killed me. They thought I was rambling. I’m not rambling,” he said.
“My uncle was a brilliant professor at MIT for many years, I think he was the longest-tenured. He was very smart and had three different degrees. So I have an aptitude for a lot of different things. There is such a thing as aptitude.”
Trump then revisited the story about the sharks and the batteries.
Some see the former president’s speeches as nothing more than a stream of fragmented thoughts, while others see them as logical performances, with a coherent pattern of thought apparent in the connections between his stray comments.
O’Brien, who described Trump as using his rallies as therapy sessions where he works out emotional and psychological issues on stage, said it would be a mistake to try to extract too much meaning from Trump’s speeches.
“It’s foolish to try to find method in his madness. He’s so narcissistic and so entitled that he stands in front of huge crowds and freely associates whatever comes into his head. It’s frustrating for his political advisers. It’s frustrating for the Republican Party,” he said.
“But to the 25 to 30 percent of his base, the Republican voters, he’s appealing as performance art. He’s not offering them a menu of public policy options or real solutions to their fundamental problems. It’s simply because they feel invited into this world through this meaningless, nonlinear performance art.”
