Trump has a new apologist with linguist James McWhorter who says he has mastered 'the weave" speaking style, by Hal Brown, MSW

 

James McWhorter is a Columbia University linguist who explores how race and language shape our politics and culture. He just had this column published in The NY Times:

He begins his column this way:

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.

The "friend" reference refers to this

During a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on August 30, Trump asserted that what the “Fake News” describes as rambling is actually a genius-level rhetorical device he calls “the weave.”

“You know, I do the weave,” Trump said. “You know what the weave is? 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.’”

This is far from the first time Trump has tried to deny or explain away allegations of incoherence. When he kept publicly mixing up the names Barack Obama and Joe Biden, he said we just don’t understand sarcasm. After a Wall Street Journal poll that found nearly half of respondents didn’t think Trump is mentally up to the presidency, he bragged about passing a dementia test years earlier, and challenged Rupert Murdoch and the paper’s editors to do the same. And in response to reports that he had a bizarre public post-DNC meltdown, Trump insisted in a Truth Social post that Fox News called him first (which wasn’t the issue) and that Maureen Dowd is “gilted” (whatever that means).

None of this really made any sense, but presumably these arguments, much like Trump’s meandering rally tirades, were crystal clear to his many English-professor friends. It’s lucky for Trump that academics who have no problem breaking down his Ulysses-esque political messaging make up such a huge portion of the American electorate!

 

Read article in NY Magazine.

This linguist suggests Trump's incoherent word salad is deliberate. I disagree.

I do not think Trump uses this speech pattern or style skillfully. I do not think it is deliberate. I don't even think this is a powerful tool with his cult. He may get laughs telling shark stories at rallies but I expect that many in the audience are completely lost when he says things like this.

Like other shrinks (for example Harry Segal,  Lance Dodes, and his neice Mary Trump, I have done some writing about Trump (see Google search for some of my essays) having dementia and have concluded that there is a good chance that he is in the early stages. 

McWhorter seems to be engaging in what is now being called "sane washing" (see this article) and also "Donald Trump's incoherence makes the media's double standard hard to hide" by Heather "Digby" Parton in Salon. She writes:

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been speaking nonsense and spouting gibberish on the campaign trail and the media is covering for him by pretending that his verbal incontinence actually makes sense or by ignoring it altogether. Yes, there's been some mordant chuckling in the media over his bizarre comments about "the late great Hannibal Lecter" and his meandering tales about electric boats and shark attacks. Those stories are all delivered with a twinkling eye-roll as if to say "Oh that wacky Trump, there he goes again" as if it's just a funny little anecdote, apropos of nothing.

Read her entire article. She lays it out far better than I could.

There have been other recent articles about how the MSM, including the NY Times, is doing this. The authors of these article sometimes try to translate incoherent word salad into something that makes sense. I say they are adding dementia detergent to Trump's word salad stained speech and trying to wash it out. McWhorter, as a linguist, has no expertise in dementia. I think, whether he is doing this deliberately or not, he has become an apolgist for Trump. 

Note in this article McWhorter only mentions dementia once:

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.

I think the crucial paragraph in the recent McWhorter article is:

However, the distinction between public and private speech is key here, so I am unconvinced that his current speech patterns can be analyzed as evidence of dementia. Instead, they’re characteristics of casual speech as it has always existed.

This is the only time dementia is referred to.

I have never heard anyone speak casually the way Trump does unless you count the seriously mentally ill patients who went off their medication in my old community mental health program

McWhorter seems to be saying that Trump uses "the weave" deliberately and skillfully. I certainly don't.  He begins with the 2015 example which could be a deliberate use of the weave but also a sign of early dementia:

Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at M.I.T.; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, they do a number ….

In this example the elements are all related, albeit losely. Compare this to his recent bacon comment. None of the elements are related. 

You take a look at bacon and some of these products,” Trump said at a recent town hall in Wisconsin. “Some people don’t eat bacon anymore. And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down — you know, this was caused by their horrible energy — wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.”

The most publicized comment about sharks and electrocution can most charitably be decribed as free association. This is a technique used in psychoanalysis to uncover unconconscious meanings.  In fact, if Trump was in traditional psychoanalysis this is what he'd be doing if he was asked to free associate to a dream about being on a sinking electric boat. 

If Trump doesn't have early dementia he may be suffering from mania which for him would be a good thing since there are medications to treat this.  

Addendum:

It isn't only the word salad that demonstrates that Trump has lost mental acuity. Consider how he says things that ultimately can be used to his detriment, for example what he said about E. Jean Carroll yesterday.

Read previous blog posts here.