Trump's rhetorical "weave"
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Shawn McCreesh, "Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius." NYT 9/1/2024:
For weeks, former President Donald J. Trump’s advisers have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message.
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.’”
This is (a version of) one of the points that I've made over the years in (too many) posts about Trump's speaking style. Back in 2015, Geoff Pullum posted about "Trump's aphasia", and I responded:
Geoff Pullum uses terms like "aphasia", and phrases like "I don't think there's any structure in there", in describing a quoted passage from Donald Trump's 7/21/2015 speech in Sun City SC. But in my opinion, he's been misled by a notorious problem: the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form.
This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form, the cues are gone, and we lose the thread.
And in some of these posts, I've been tempted to use the term "weave" to describe the result, since the repeated layers of false starts and parentheticals are a bit like the patterns of overlaid and intersecting threads in woven fabric. "Thread" is a standard metaphor for connected topics in discourse, and for connected processes in computing — as in my phrase "we lose the thread".
I've always rejected the "weave" metaphor for Trump's rhetorical style, because his tissue of "threads" is so chaotic and irregular — though as I wrote in 2015,
Overall, I think the passage is entirely comprehensible, and in the context of the speech as a whole, even eloquent. The false starts and parentheticals may actually make the speech better, at least for people who are open to liking Trump and endorsing his ideas, by giving an impression of enthusiasm and genuineness.
As I've noted before, there are some better metaphors for this discourse style in a 19th-century poem by Arthur Hugh Clough:
Spare me, O mistress of Song! nor bid me remember minutely
All that was said and done o'er the well-mixed tempting toddy;
How were healths proposed and drunk 'with all the honours,'
Glasses and bonnets waving, and three-times-three thrice over,
Queen, and Prince, and Army, and Landlords all, and Keepers;
Bid me not, grammar defying, repeat from grammar-defiers
Long constructions strange and plusquam-Thucydidean;
Tell how, as sudden torrent in time of speat in the mountain
Hurries six ways at once, and takes at last to the roughest,
Or as the practised rider at Astley's or Franconi's
Skilfully, boldly bestrides many steeds at once in the gallop,
Crossing from this to that, with one leg here, one yonder,
So, less skilful, but equally bold, and wild as the torrent,
All through sentences six at a time, unsuspecting of syntax,
Hurried the lively good-will and garrulous tale of Sir Hector.
Trump is a teetotaler, but many others over the years have associated Trump's speeches with "the well-mixed tempting toddy" — see the many skits from 2015 linked here, where comedians lip-sync his recordings in the persona of "your drunk neighbor", "some wasted guy", "your drunk frat bro", etc. And there's an MSNBC news interview with John McWhorter in 2019, "Linguist Expert: President Donald Trump Sounds Like Your Beer-Swilling Uncle".
FWIW, here's the passage from the 8/30/2024 Johnstown rally where Trump praises his "weave", along with some prior context:
But to show you how bad the fake news is
some of the gold star families
you probably read this over the last couple of days
you know a lot of people say
"sir don't hit down, don't hit down on them the fake news"
"don't hit down sir, don't even mention-"
I said "should I mention it?"
"Don't hit down"
Well when it became sort of a story so I always like to mention it
cause it you don't mention it, our supporters
don't really know what to believe and they sort of believe this stuff
So the gold star families and uh
incredible people
and I got to know them because uh
thirteen families who were-
as you know lost a loved one
in Afghanistan
so needlessly
because we have incompetent-
we have an incompetent president
and vice president
grossly incompetent, and we had Milley and these incompetent generals
that should have been fired immediately not one person was fired over Afghanistan.
And by the way Russia saw that,
they went into Ukraine
because they said I had no idea that the United States was so stupid.
So-
and you know when I was running that I spoke to the leader
of the Taliban, he run- they run the whole deal
and I said "Abdul don't even think- don't do it Abdul don't do it"
because they were shooting- they were killing our people
and they were really killing them previous to me-
Obama- they were
killing them in the Obama administration and with Biden.
Biden.
But uh how did he do in the debate?
Friend of mine said
"Sir what did you do you ch-"
I said "How good was I tonight?" "Sir,"
"you probably got him thrown out"
"now you're going to have to run against somebody new."
I said "I don't care, I have to do what I have to do
we have to do what we have to do, right?".
And I look forward to the debate with her.
But what happened so with Afghanistan-
you know I do the weave.
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-
and friends of mine that are like English professors they say
"It's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen."
And- but the fake news, you know what they say?
"He rambled."
It's not rambling.
When you have- what you do is you get off a subject to
mention another little tidbit
and you get back onto the subject
and you go through this and you do it for two hours
and you don't even mispronounce one word.
And they say he had a hundred thousand people-
you know New Jersey we had a hundred and seven thousand people
they never like to report it so I say it but
in Wildwood New Jersey they announced a hundred and seven thousand people
and then they say-
well look at this, I mean if you gave me a big arena I would have-
we would've said {audio breakup}
But it is rather- you know but they say
as he rambled but in Afghanistan-
so what happens is you
take the wonderful families
[…]
I don't think that the Greeks (or later theorists of rhetoric) had a word for this kind of "weave". The technique is hardly Donald Trump's invention, but maybe we should adopt his term.
At least I think his use (and definition) of the term is original, though the metaphor is is Out There…
Update — more mass-media commentary, mostly (too?) negative, as are the comments on social media…
Laura Morland said,
September 3, 2024 @ 7:15 am
Thanks for the transcript, so that I could read his words without being distracted by his voice or (even worse) his face.
I must admit that, as much as I despise the guy, there is something compelling and even entertaining in his flow of words, as represented here.
However, a weaver has a product at the end. Perhaps it was due to the audio quality, but the last few phrases read as if someone has slowly turned down the volume. They allow one to think, "Oh yeah, he did circle around to his original topic." But to what point? Does he just drift off?
Could his discourse be "the most brilliant thing" *any* English professor has ever seen"? Or is it a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing?
Mark Liberman said,
September 3, 2024 @ 7:29 am
@Laura Morland: "Perhaps it was due to the audio quality, but the last few phrases read as if someone has slowly turned down the volume. They allow one to think, "Oh yeah, he did circle around to his original topic." But to what point? Does he just drift off?"
I think his original topic (or one of them anyhow) was the Arlington Cemetery event, and he goes go back to that (along with some other things) for a while. You can continue listening at this link …
Tim Leonard said,
September 3, 2024 @ 9:48 am
A fabric formed of compressed and unstructured threads is called "felt". And Trump's speech style certainly seems to be more felt than woven.
Yves Rehbein said,
September 3, 2024 @ 10:24 am
I compuslory have to second guess what sense of weave we are talking about. I like the thread metaphor and the "stuff" of legends (German Stoff "matter", or "textile", cf. text). Indeed i think that Trump is a legend like a double agent has an alias and a back story that passes the background check. On the other hand, to weave got to be the equivalent of wallow, to talk rhuburb: waffle, cf. "Waff is derived from Early Scots waff (“signal; gust of wind; glimpse; a flapping, waving”)",
related to to weave as it turns out, and to waffles of course because of the weave pattern of wafers, not related to oblata https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/waffle
They spin a yarn https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spin_a_yarn in Polish: bajać.
Suppose you could identify a root extension *
bʰ(h₂). Instead of an e-grade *webʰ-, a high vowel may be required, compare regional obsolete (Low) German wiebeln, wiefeln; also Wimpel instead of Wappen (Pokorny indirectly confirms, cf. *u̯eib-, *uimb-). To the contrary, German has Geschwafeln in place of waffle; Pfeifer adds Bavarian schweibeln tentatively https://www.dwds.de/wb/etymwb/schwafeln
That would make it lsrgely unrelated to weben "weave". Maybe related to wip (compare regional German Ratsche "wip", "gossiping womanfolk" and other colexification like it, to crack a joke).
TL;DR: Trump ought to stop vibing!
Xtifr said,
September 3, 2024 @ 12:24 pm
"Weave" has been used for a long time to describe what storytellers do: "weave a story." I don't think what Trump does quite fits with the usual usage there. Although it does sometimes resembles the technique known as "dodge and weave". And his speeches do often contain obvious fabrications or elements made up "whole cloth". (Though that is not unusual in a politician.) :)
My usual term for his rhetorical style, though, is rambling. But since that style is often associated with intoxication, exhaustion, and/or age, it's easy to see why old man Trump might not embrace the term and might want to hunt for a new, more flattering term.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 3, 2024 @ 2:25 pm
This thread has had the side effect of causing me to learn (at least taking wiktionary at face value and not digging deeper into other reference sources) that the "weave" of "bob and weave" etc. is a homophone etymologically unrelated to the "weave" meaning "create fabric from fibers" rather than the former being, as I had naively supposed, a metaphorical extension of the latter that had somehow drifted semantically to the point that it was no longer particularly obvious.
AntC said,
September 3, 2024 @ 2:56 pm
Who are these alleged English professors?
Come to that, who are these "friends"? I don't believe Trump has friends in the sense I'd use the word (intimates, confidantes). He has only people he's grifting from; or who are helping him grift off others.
When Pullum [pleeease come back!] says
It's not merely that Trump is detached from any rhetorical or linguistic convention; Trump is detached from anything a speaker would recognise as facts.
RfP said,
September 3, 2024 @ 4:06 pm
@AntC
Trump is actually a brilliant rhetorician, and those of us who oppose his politics ignore that at our peril.
I think that part of the difficulty in recognizing this is that Trump isn’t quite as effective as Saruman, as described here in Book Three of The Lord of The Rings.
If he were, we’d be in even deeper trouble, but since this is Language Log, I am mostly making this comment as an exercise in comparative rhetoric:
JPL said,
September 3, 2024 @ 4:16 pm
That's a rambling conversational style (not a technical term) where, if he were sitting across from you, you wouldn't have to listen, because he's saying absolutely nothing of any significance. One thing Trump has always been fairly good at is schmoozing, and that's all he's doing here. His saying, "English professors … say 'It's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen.'" is like his frequent claims that "really I'm very smart", etc. In other contexts, when he feels called upon to say something about policy, he will simply trot out a series of simple often used prefabricated phrases without engaging in any thought that he's trying to express. Cult followers and journalists never listen to what he actually says, or offer any critique of whether what he says makes any sense in the way you might expect a candidate for President to make sense.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
September 3, 2024 @ 6:49 pm
Overshot weaving is one weaving technique among many. Threads that are overshot ride over the base threads to create a design, and some weavers call it “floatwork.” It’s a well-known technique used in American handwoven coverlets. For more information about coverlets and a link to the Bedford, Pennsylvania, museum, go here:
https://comfortclothweaving.com/article/history-overshot-weaving
More technical information here:
https://schachtspindle.com/blogs/archives/reupholstering-a-chair-with-overshot-fabric?srsltid=AfmBOorYVNrudoLZrBDrICuz_HyX4SvnEe0EsWUZY1H9VQF-UprTxRDO
Some textile judges dislike overshot weaves because the threads may be loose or snag easily. One I encountered was very sniffy about a weaver using overshot as a “shortcut.”
I would not call Trump’s rhetorical method a plainweave, but perhaps his style could be likened to overshot.
loon said,
September 4, 2024 @ 4:28 am
Yves Rehbein has it right. It is weaving, if we count waffling, bobbing, flapping and tall-tales-production as within that term. As an aside: I blame the media – you can listen to /read/watch countless hours of content about how Trump, how Hillary, how Biden, how Obama, but zilch on what Trump, what Harris, what… — Languagelog gets a pass on this, as it is its eponymous center of focus, but the rest? '[person1] raised [issue1] in a fiery speech during [event] [no mention of what was said], [person2] posted [snide comment] on X in reponse. The public is undecided on [the issue] but [person3] commented that there is a definite compounding effect of the continued attack on [issue2] with [pollster] seeing general agreement at 34 down from 35 last week.' … and no relevant information was given.
Laura Morland said,
September 4, 2024 @ 6:49 am
Just for fun: Stephen Colbert's riff on the same "weave":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmFDrNwGctk&t=358s
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
September 4, 2024 @ 7:49 am
Gosh, it seems like you folks really don't care for the man much. Seems a shame, seeing's how he too was once a babe in his mother's arms, just like each one of us.
David Morris said,
September 4, 2024 @ 7:56 am
Another weaving-related term is 'warp', as in 'warping reality' and 'time warp'.
/df said,
September 4, 2024 @ 8:05 am
Another deceptive weave is the Thach (nothing to do with grass roofing), an air-warfare tactic in which two less manoeuvrable planes (originally, Wildcats) lure a higher-performing opponent (originally, Zeros) into a position where it can be fired on by the lesser attackers.
Philip Taylor said,
September 4, 2024 @ 1:31 pm
"Seems a shame, seeing's how he too was once a babe in his mother's arms" — as was Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin (add further names as you see fit).
Kormac said,
September 4, 2024 @ 2:37 pm
I suppose we can call what he does "nested digressions", although he might end one digression prematurely and continue it during a later digression, creating the "weave" effect.
Haamu said,
September 4, 2024 @ 3:20 pm
@Benjamin E. Orsatti — I'm with you; it is a shame. The pertinent question, though, is: With whom should the shame reside?