"This is the only musical: the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain."

Oh! The Trump haters are having a great time with this passage from Trump's Montana rally. One of the many, many topics Trump touched on and skittered across was that the elite media won't admit he's a great speaker — "They never say I’m a great speaker" — and "Why the hell do so many people come? It’s got to be something. I guess they like my policy?"

An ordinary person, speaking spontaneously, would take that idea and run with it. Just off the top of my head, here's what I'd say: The media cannot deny the size of these crowds, so if they don't say I'm a great speaker, the only other explanation is that the people must love my policies, but they won't say that either, which proves they won't give me any credit for anything, even when pure logic requires it. They're so biased and dishonest.

But Trump seems to trust that he's already got that point across. No need to belabor it. And he's got something more fun to leap to. Look, it's Elton John! He has a thing to say that includes Elton John, and he doesn't even use the idea that he called Kim Jong-Un "Rocket Man" as a segue. He just plunges into it with this:

I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really we do it without like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical: the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.

If you hate Trump, that's a huge, insane word salad — especially if you go with the transcript and don't get into the flow of the performance. Here's the top-rated comment on that passage at Reddit:

I really would like to know what people get out of listening [to] him at these rallies. I mean, my brain hurt just trying to read that transcript. How can people listen to that? Do they even understand what he's talking about? Does he? Christ, he really needs to be psychologically evaluated because there's something seriously not right.

Note the assumption that a verbatim transcript should give more of a sense of coherence to spoken word. That's not true. On this issue, I always go back to this passage from Janet Malcolm's great book "The Journalist and the Murderer":

When we talk with somebody, we are not aware of the strangeness of the language we are speaking. Our ear takes it in as English, and only if we see it transcribed verbatim do we realize that it is a kind of foreign tongue. What the tape recorder has revealed about human speech — that Molière’s M. Jourdain* was mistaken: we do not, after all, speak in prose — is something like what the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies** revealed about animal locomotion. Muybridge’s fast camera caught and froze positions never before seen, and demonstrated that artists throughout art history had been “wrong” in their renderings of horses (among other animals) in motion. Contemporary artists, at first upset by Muybridge’s discoveries, soon regained their equanimity, and continued to render what the eye, rather than the camera, sees. Similarly, novelists of our tape-recorder era have continued to write dialogue in English rather than in tape-recorderese, and most journalists who work with a tape recorder use the transcript of an extended interview merely as an aid to memory—as a sort of second chance at note-taking—rather than as a text for quotation. The transcript is not a finished version, but a kind of rough draft of expression. As everyone who has studied transcripts of tape-recorded speech knows, we all seem to be extremely reluctant to come right out and say what we mean—thus the bizarre syntax, the hesitations, the circumlocutions, the repetitions, the contradictions, the lacunae in almost every non-sentence we speak. The tape recorder has opened up a sort of underwater world of linguistic phenomena whose Cousteaus are as yet unknown to the general public.

Quoting that passage in 2013 — before the ascendency of Trump — I said:

Now, I think some people do speak in unbroken, well-structured sentences that are free of grammatical errors that could be transcribed directly into excellent writing, but I don't think those stuck listening to them are very happy with it. We need the backtracking and disfluencies to feel comfortable....

I'd tend to be suspicious of anyone who seemed to be trying too hard to speak like writing or to write like speaking. I'd wonder what's up? What's the motivation? A speaker who strains to sound like writing might have an inferiority complex or a pompous, arrogant nature.

Reverse engineer that and you can see many things that could be true and appealing about Trump: He's talking straight from his head like me and my friends.

For someone who thinks like that, the mockery from Trump haters — like that " How can people listen to that?" at Reddit — is personally insulting, like being put in the "basket of deplorables." That only bonds Trump's fans more closely to Trump and makes them more likely to go to the next rally, where it's fun and funny and the stiffs can't laugh and don't understand.

Which brings me back to the subject of rock and roll. Let's look at the substance of the Elton John riff. I think that this is a riff he's done in private and he just can't do the whole thing in public. The pauses in the audio version makes this false start even more apparent.

I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. 

So that's a great set up for talking about male genitalia. There's no reason to bring up an organ unless that's where you want to go. Elton John does sometimes play the organ, like here, on my favorite Elton John song, "Daniel"...



... but he's far more closely associated with the piano. Trump chose to say organ because it's penis-y. In that view, it's hilarious to say "I don’t have... an organ. No organ." He pauses at that point. I laughed. Here's this man who was mocked during the presidential campaign for having a small penis (because, we were told by Marco Rubio, he has small hands), and now, he's riding so high he can have fun with saying he has no penis at all. This is a man who loves to have fun. And he talks like me and my friends. If only we could hang out with him, we'd hear a much, much funnier, dirtier version of the me-and-Elton riff.

Since he can't do the full "no organ" riff, after the pause, he adds another idea. It's just him and his mouth and his brain doing the whole act that the big crowd came to hear. There are no instruments and no other people doing the performance.

We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really we do it without like, the musical instruments.

Notice how fiercely he avoids saying "I." It's always "we," even when the point he's making is that he's alone on the stage, doing the entire performance:

This is the only musical: the mouth. 

He's speaking so impetuously that he just says "musical" for "musical instrument." You know what he means. If you like him, that is. If you don't then it's ridiculous insanity: The only musical, The Mouth??? Now, opening on Broadway, the new musical — The Mouth!

I think Trump knew at this point that he was getting a little ridiculous. He couldn't follow through on that "organ" stuff and switched to nattering about the size of the room and all the people in it, so he finished off the topic with a little self-deprecation:

And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.

I'm sure that if Trump were in private and he could work blue, he'd have opened up the subject of the brain as an organ that's "more important" than the other organ, the one he would have joked about earlier, but he just can't do it here... because his connected-to-his-mouth brain is telling him he can't say that, but he can show us enough to get into our brain-connected-to-our-ears that we can imagine what it would be like to hang out with Trump after the show. And then we are groupies.

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* Malcolm refers to the famous line in the play "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme": "My faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose while knowing nothing of it, and I am the most obliged person in the world to you for telling me so."

** Muybridge's The Horse in Motion, 1878: