I was going to write about how long Push-up Pete and other members of the Trump cabal have to bother testifying before Congress and then Trump came on and launched into a rant. This was supposed to be a one topic Substack. Thanks to Trump and an unhinged weave I ended up writing about two.

We learned one thing yesterday about members of Trump’s cabal, sometimes referred to as his Cabinet. They are not all invulnerable. At least not invulnerable to allergy attacks serious enough to require hospitalization. Of course I am referring to Kristi Noem. What I didn’t know until just now is that not only does she like to visit prisons in El Salvador but she, for whatever reason, decided to visit a biohazard lab with Rand Paul and RFK Jr.. (See Newsweek article.)

Perhaps she feels she must live up to her image as being fearless. Consider this from the Newsweek article:

Bruce Levell, an ally of President Donald Trump on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday: "My dear friend @Sec_Noem, our fearless Secretary of Homeland Security, was just rushed to the hospital. My heart is with her during this challenging time, but I know her strength and determination will shine through.

All this being said, Noem is one of the members of Trump’s Cabal (aka Cabinet) who has testified before Congress.

My point is that we will know when Trump has firmed up his dictatorship 100% when he tells members of his cabal to ignore Congress when they are asked to testify.

Today I thought of writing this while watching MSNBC this morning and saw this:

He’s on as I write this:

In case you wonder why I call Hegseth “Puch-up Pete” here’s a photo:

He’s competing onscreen with Trump who is talking about the glorious giant two flagpoles -with his blah blah blag braggadocio abut how great they will be.

He’s throwing in something about the fake news and the Fed lowering rates, he’s rambling on insulting Jerome Powell, abruptly shifts to talking about the best poles in the world, blah blah. He’s distracting me with the weave. He’s now insulting Biden and everyone who pops into his mind.

Holy shit… I can’t even get through writing a Substack while MSNBC is on without being led into my own “weave” thanks to Trump and his weave. 

He even compliments the construction workers and gets them to laugh and throws in Harvey Weinstein and talks about the word erection without saying it. He calls it the e-word. I wasn’t going to use the image below. I made it yesterday to post in a comment on a RawStory article about the flags:

Shit, he’s still rambling on and trying to joke with the construction workers about what would happen if any of them are illegal immigrants. He is now touting the $5 million Trump Card which would allow foreigners to buy their way into the country.

This is pure Trump. Perhaps he was frustrated when he couldn’t unleash his vitriol in his mercifully brief parade speech.

He just blasted Biden for having no clue and the autopen and men playing in women’s sports. 

Thank you, MSNBC, for restoring my sanity as they just cut away from the rant.

Okay, I can’t resist reflecting on Trump’s bringing up the e-word. Trump is obsessed with size. He just admitted that he knows damn well what he admires about how big, tall, and upright his glorious flagpoles are going to be. 

I wonder if he knows that at 100 feet it doen’t come close to being the world’s tallest flagpole (see list). The tallest is 662 feet and is in Cario. Now, that a damn tall flagpole (watch video).

Here’s a minute long segment of his “weave” rant:

Now I can have Ann proofread this for typos and send it to you.

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If Trump has dementia it might be a kind doctors have never seen. Call it weaveheimers. If not, the weave may be as brilliant as he says it is. By Hal M. Brown, MSW

I was among numerous mental health experts who thought there was evidence that Trump was in the early stages of dementia. Most of what we pointed to as symptomatic was his fragmented speaking style where he jumped from disconnected topic to disconnected topic. We often called it word salad. He never denied he did this but he described it in a positive way. This is from The New York Times on Sept. 1. 2024:

Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s speeches often wander from topic to topic. He insists there is an art to stitching them all together.

But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.

“You know, I do the weave,” he 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.’”

Asked for examples of the technique, the Trump campaign provided what it called a “masterclass weave” — a four-minute, 20-second video of the candidate speaking at a rally in Asheville, N.C., in August in which he bounces from energy bills to Hunter Biden’s laptop to Venezuelan tar to mental institutions in Caracas to migrant crime to “the green new scam” to Vice President Kamala Harris. 

 

Trump has said his speaking style, his weave, is genius. What if it is? Here's more from The NY Times:

Certainly, in the history of narrative, there have been writers celebrated for their ability to be discursive only to cleverly tie together all their themes with a neat bow at the end — William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Larry David come to mind. But in the case of Mr. Trump, it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University and a renowned Shakespeare scholar, ruminated about Mr. Trump’s use of the word: “I read Trump’s comment bragging that ‘I do the weave.’ I take him at his word, as one of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of ‘weave’ is ‘to pursue a devious course.’”

James Joyce was celebrated for his stream of consciousness that, over the course of hundreds of pages, revealed a person’s temperament. William Faulkner was an early adopter of the weave, engaging in a kind of circular storytelling, as seen in “Absalom, Absalom!” These weavers were trying to capture on the page the inconstant nature of a shifting mind.

If it is not an indication of dementia or psychosis, as a Freudian I see his speaking style as free association. Instead of putting a filter between his unconscious and what comes out of his mouth he does what a patient on an analyst's couch does. He says whatever comes into his mind without censoring it or trying to make it sound rational. If he was in psychoanalysis with his analysts help he would try to understand the messages his unconscious was sending him.

Because he often did this so-called weave during rallies he had the audience reaction to decide which lines were effective. If the crowd cheered or laughed he incorporated the better lines into subsequent rally speeches and interviews. If an audience didn't repsond the first time he'd know not to use the lines again. The effective lines became part of his shtick.

If Trump has dementia we are likely to see it worsen over the next few years. If he doesn't I will be able to say that I was wrong.

It will be a major mea culpa. After all I'm the clinical social worker in the title of this Salon Chauncey DeVega column:

Clinical social worker: "With the Trump Bible, one must consider dementia"

Here's more of what I wrote at other times:

It wasn't just myself and a handful of clinicians seeing signs of dementia with Trump. Here's a general Google search of "Trump dementia" and here's a Google News search of the same terms. 

There are two things we will discover about Trump in the coming months and years. One is whether he really wants to follow Project 2025 chapter and verse and remake the country into an authoritarian country with him as its dictator. The signs that he is trying to do this will be obvious. The other thing we will know is whether he has dementia because this condition, while its course varies, always gets worse.

If Trump has been doing the brilliant and beautiful weave perhaps we'll see that he's created a tapestry you might want in your house.

However, we don't know whether he'll create a lovely tapestry or an ugly scary one.

If he has dementia his weave could create something that looks like this:

These images were created by Perchance Photo AI

Read previous blogs here.

Addendum on a personal note: 

I live in a continuing care retirement community in a liberal suburb of Portland, Oregon. Many of the residents here, almost all of whom are politically progressive, have taken to wearing generic name tags. I had my own made to reflect how I was feeling. The first used as a background Salvadore Dali's painting The Persistence of Memory (see Wiki article). 

Then as the election approached with the polls neck and neck I had another one made with the figure from Edvard Munch's "The Scream" (see Wiki).

Thinking Kamala might win I had yet a third one made with another Dali painting, Le Sommeil (Sleep) which you can read about here. Here's the excerpt that resonates with me:

Freudian theories, however, extends beyond just a consideration of the unconscious. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Freud, the renowned psychologist proposed a theory, Thanatos, or 'Death Instinct', in which he suggests that all animals, including humans, try to prolong their life by defending all threats of death that are inappropriate to their particular species. In humans, this is manifest as aggression if the threat is external and self-destruction when directed at the self. The counterpart to Thanatos is Eros in which an individual life moves towards a 'natural' death. Le Sommeil seems to suggest that tension, the head in a catatonic state supported by a series of crutches.

Now I am not sure which one I will be wearing. Perhaps I will alternate. 

(Click below to enlarge)