Writes Shawn McCreesh — a Dickensian name — in "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" (NYT).
McCreesh quotes Trump: "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, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, 'It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.'"
Not only does the article refuse to acknowledge that Trump's rally speeches are genius, it casts doubt on whether Trump has any English professor friends.
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When I think of Shakespeare and Dickens, my mind goes right to Larry David. That’s because he’s the modern day version of both!
Do these libs realize how stupid they are? Larry David?
Trump consistently manages to draw the negative qualities his opponents claim are his out of them, and make them look like they have those qualities worse than he does. It's a kind of magic common to charismatic people. Trump is so petty and churlish, puerile, etc. This article is incredibly petty and churlish and puerile.
The “weave”, eh? Is that like what he does to his hair to cover his bald spot? Looks like more people than just Althouse and I noticed his Johnstown
“Town hall” was especially disjointed. Trump wasn’t able to weave his many off topic, unresponsive comments together to answer questions or make sense. The “woven” product was moth bitten and full of holes.
Exactly what I'm talking about. Trump's alleged negative qualities are drawn out of Inga by the mere mention of Trump, and Inga ends up looking dominated by those qualities far more than Trump is.
My mind goes straight to Larry David when I try to think who is the modern Shakespeare or Dickens.
Do these libs realize how stupid they are? Larry David? Please!
Full credit for doing the work himself, unlike whoever the declared candidate on the other side is at the moment.
Trump's a speaker, not a writer. The crowd is part of it. Talking personally he's just polite and respectful and talking about you.
Perhaps you missed Althouse’s blog post about Trumps Johnstown “town hall” event.
Said Donald Trump, quite chaotically, at the town hall in La Crosse, Wisconsin last night. Maybe "Comrade Kamala" won't talk to anybody, but Trump will talk and talk, riffing from subject to subject, revealing the awful confusion behind the scenes, acknowledging the town hall and the presence of Tulsi Gabbard, but frantically filibustering as if desperate to prevent the audience and Tulsi from sharing the spotlight. Oh, that speech he would have given! It was one hell of a speech! But you're not going to get it... and you're not going to get that town hall either, not if he can string enough topics together into a crazy patchwork that can't end, won't end....
Maybe if Trump threw some academic buzzwords into his discourse he would get more respect. Like some discursive hermeneutics.
Compare and contrast: a candidate who talks to you in stream of consciousness language over and over so you acclimate to who they are and can see when something is different, vs someone who doesn’t share who they are, what they prioritize, etc. Transparent vs opaque. Which trait is better as Pres?
Trump derangement syndrome runs deep. Nothing written or discussed about Trump is fair or balanced or honest. I despise these mother fuckers for their abuse.
Some folks are so busy trying to diagram Trump's sentences that they fail completely to comprehend what he is actually saying. These are not the people he is (or should be) talking to.
I can't help feeling that McSheesh has forgotten that Shakespeare and Dickens are Dead White Guys, and part of that old White Patriarchy that we're trying to get away from. Definitely not to be lauded for getting their weaves to join up neatly. The New Weave is incoherence. Trump hasn't quite cracked it as his own weaves make dangerously tangential appraches to coherence.
Joe is the Master here, and Kamala is a pretty solid Apprentice.
“President Warren G. Harding’s way of speaking was lampooned in 1921 by the newspaper columnist H.L. Mencken, who called it “Gamalielese,” after the 29th president’s middle name, Gamaliel. “It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it,” Mr. Mencken wrote. “It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.””
They're not trying to comprehend what he's saying. They're too busy trying to figure out how to misrepresent what he's saying.
Inga, you need to get a life.
Do Democrats really want this race to come down to who better commands the English language? They might find themselves burdened by what has been.
Trump is the modern master of extemporaneous speech that empathizes with a large and developing audience. He is not given to lecturing people as if they possessed a diminutive intellect, or written off as deplorable.
Does he want to be understood? Or is it more pleasurable to him to just riff, blabber, and ramble? He wants to be president, shouldn’t he put some effort in being coherant?
Harding pulled us out of the post-WWI depression and ended the worst fascist policies of Wilson, including freeing his political prisoner. Mencken was a favorite of mine but is very critical of ordinary people.
Sorry, correction, town hall was in LaCrosse, WI.
Correction, the town hall was in LaCrosse, WI.
Harris supporters complaining that the opponent rambles and is not making enough effort to be comprehensible?
Now I *have* seen everything.
Shawn McCreesh shows how to admit that Trump is smarter, and more complex, than he can even comprehend — all without coming out and saying it, or even admitting it to himself.
"Now I *have* seen everything."
You may think so, but wait! There's (I predict) more!
Trump didn't say his friends were English professors. He said they were like English professors.
English professors don't have friends.
This was an unusual post from you, Inga. It shows some historical awareness and made me think about Harding and Mencken. But here's the enduring question about the Inga oeuvre on this site. Does the progressive project that you support have an endpoint? Or is it an infinite parade of critique and dissatisfaction?
If your project has an endpoint, what is it? If it's not about endpoints, how can you possibly fail to see that the stance you are pursuing is a stance that is aimed at achieving an endpoint that someone else, someone you don't even know, has been aiming at?
The very modern model of a master of extemporaneous speech.
As I recall, that silver-tongued orator Barack Obama became silver-tongue-tied when required to speak ex tempore. Most of these guys need writers.
"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..."
If we need a modern writer who does this look at those who created a genre like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Appeal to authority.
All of us ignorant Deplorables understand him quite well.
I objected to Trump‘s use of the weave method during what was supposed to be a town hall. In a town hall you give audience members a chance to speak and you address exactly what they’ve asked you. So the weave is rude in a town hall, but it’s genius in a rally.
Larry David is humorous, but you can see the jokes coming through the Holland Tunnel. Once he establishes the baseline gag, everything is obvious. First year writers could crank out 'Curb' episodes in their sleep.
I have never watched a full episode of Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm". The little bit I have seen is in scenes posted on the internet. I loved watching Seinfeld. The combination of Jerry and Larry somehow was genius. Larry by himself: the ultimate nasty, cranky old man with some stereotypical, negative Jewish traits tossed into the mix. I've seen enough of asshats, as he portrays, in my decades in the hospitality business, not to mention the Postal Service. Surely this "writer" cannot be serious, lumping David in with a serious novelist and the man often described as the best writer (playwright, poet) of all time.
Name any other politician who generates more goodwill and genuine laughter from his audience.
Scott Adams, who is something of a master of media manipulation (see the $100 million fortune he accumulated from Dilbert in the internet era) says that Trump is the premiere political communicator and persuader of our era. As evidence, he points often to Trump’s invention of the concept of “fake news.” Everybody now knows what that is, not to mention who it is. Trump has almost single-handedly destroyed the credibility of the legacy media. By talking.
Larry David is going to-be relevant hundreds of years from now? I don’t think so
And, I’ll add that the true measure of Trump’s rhetorical brilliance is that the DNC/Intel cartel tried to murder him. They’re gearing up to try again, too. Read the horrific lies that Kamala Harris is posting in X. She’s calling for some crazy to take another shot at murdering him.
The English Professor line cracks me up. As if English Professors are arbiters of something. Aren't they all in a room somewhere studying the works of dead people?
I think you mean "moth-eaten". You need to tweak your AI a bit.
Or to state my point from the opposite direction, you don’t try to censor, imprison and murder an opponent to shut him up unless he’s an extremely effective speaker, so effective that he endangers your political power.
Guess I'm missing the culturally elite gene as: Shakespeare, Dickens & Larry David??? Of course I also tho't it a joke when Dylan received a literature Nobel.
Ampersand,
Yes, there's an endpoint - -it's The Terror; the Killing Fields.
The search for Utopia generally ends there because, while we all might want something we call Utopia, it's murderously difficult to get everyone to agree on the exact details.
More smug lib stupidity. You assholes aren't smarter than us, you aren't better than us, and you're not The Good Guys.
https://youtu.be/poz6W0znOfk?si=hezKkabkPJCvBU3H
The reference to Larry David may be as much or more to "Seinfeld" as to "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Juggling four story lines successfully was more of an achievement than one or two. Still, he's no Shakespeare or Dickens. Perhaps the point of putting the three together is to say, "I know who the greatest dramatist and novelist in the language are and so do you, but I am also hip and with-it, and so are you, if you catch the allusion."
Trump is vain, but he's not wrong. He does have a way of holding on to an audience as he weaves themes in and out. It's an achievement, but not much of one if he doesn't also have focus, concentration and decisiveness in doing his job. Greater structure in speeches might indicate to skeptics that he has that ability to focus.
"Hermeneutic" is a term I first encountered in Grad school by a Socialist professor who had no clue about how to conduct objective research. It basically means that we will play out theory until we get the result we want.
The Marxists have thoroughly taken over the universities. This was becoming obvious more than 45 years ago.
Inga, you won't ever draw and hold a crowd----not even at your funeral.
And while I'm at it: when you remind everyone you were a nurse for years, why does the phrase "Angel of Death" come to mind?
Did you "assist" some conservative codgers in that Elder Care facility you pretended to work in, by injecting them with gas-filled hypodermics?
You give off an unmistakable vibe.
Absolutely!
At bottom, by focusing on the education, race, and class of persons engaged in interpreting texts, hermeneutics is merely the "Ad hominem" fallacy gussied up to appear respectable.
“Inga, you need to get a life.”
Or another cat. Just sayin’…
On the subject of genius, what sort of a sub-genius adopts a Gaelic given name and then spells it S-H-A-W-N. Is it acceptable to spell the common word signifying the rise of the morning sun often used as a given name D-E-A-N?
Ask Dick Shawn.
vs someone who doesn’t share who they are, what they prioritize, etc. Transparent vs opaque.
"...the significance of the passage of time, and there is great significance to the passage of time" isn't transparent?
I find it very transparent indeed.
It is true that not everything a president does has to be (or can be) on public display. But lest our lefties forget, even the stuff that isn't public, such as negotiations with hostile foreign powers, has an important effect. And voters' primary way of gauging (not gouging) whether a president can perform live is how they perform live, even though the audience is only the American public, a group that tends to give even its opposing candidates (except in Trump's case) the benefit of the doubt.
And when the candidate who can't perform live is a Democrat, with the full weight of the Democrat-friendly media behind her, we can be pretty confident she's not ready for prime time.
There's a reason for the 35+ age floor. In Virginia in the 1700s, average life expectancy for (presumably white) married men was 48 in the 1700s - a 35yo may well have experienced some of his most productive years. This is no longer the case. Plus we have a political class now that we didn't have back then, so someone like Kamala Harris (or me) may not have accomplished anything of note, in terms of actual impact on society, by age 59 (unless I really kick it out and do something important in the next year and half). Trump, by contrast, has created and negotiated a LOT. Undeniably.
Nothing like a strong sense of self.
Is there a single liberal who gets a joke? Who understands schtick? Who isn’t a dead literalist? When it comes to Trump, nope.
Hillary started the "fake news" thing to use against the right. Trump quickly turned the tables on her and began using it, rightfully, against the left.Hillary Clinton calls fake news ‘an epidemic’ with real world consequences
"McCreesh quotes Trump: "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, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, 'It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.'""
Read it aloud as if you areTrump joking, it is actually funny
"If you can't kill them with kindness, baffle them with
bullshit." Is Trump's MO. Rambling back and fourth over the same half dozen talking points isn't genius. As HL Menkin may have said: nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
One of the first things I learned as a young lawyer taking depositions is that "normal" people (and for that matter the weird ones as well) do not speak in complete sentences, let along complete paragraphs. The absolute meanest thing that a court reporter can do to a young lawyer is record each and every word, pause, unh, eh as he or she asks a question. {Ask me how I learned that lesson some fifty years ago.]
Conversations are really exchanges between two, three or even four people, and there's not a completed sentence on the table. Trump's style is conversational--and ordinary people understand that, because that's the style they use on a day in day out basis.
New York Times writers don't understand that. Teleprompter speeches and pant creases do tend to excite such people. As for me I can take or leave people like that--but mostly leave them.
They understand what Trump is saying, the game is to portray what he's saying in the most absurd way. It's the same game they been playing for 8 years now. Strip the context. Make the obvious jokes seem like straight statements. Remove the jocularity.
He communicates what he wants communicated. The media can't help itself. They could always just ignore him completely and drain his power away. He's got a little bit of that power that Limbaugh had, the ability to make them pay attention.
Trump speaks off the cuff in a stream of consciousness manner. He's already forgotten what he said before McScreech has prepared the first line of his thousand word diatribe.
You'd think those smart guys at the Times would have figured this out by now.
Too bad its not possible to copy and paste "The Communist Manifesto".
Todays democrat playbook.
Autism or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is usually thought of as a behavioral and social communication impairment. However, it is a broad-based neurodevelopmental or brain-based disorder that is the result of genetic events that occur prior to birth with widespread effects on cognitive and socio-emotional development (Geschwind, 2009). Autism clearly affects social functioning, but it has an impact on the development and use of language that extends beyond pragmatics.
So Trump could have a serious ASD condition. Gosh, it didn't take long to find out why his mind returns again and again to linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, to windmills and to Rosie O’Donnell - his unstable thought process is likely the result of a genetic brain malfuntion.
Here is a Times editor and Maureen Dowd introducing the author of this hit piece to the political desk. What would one call this style of discourse?
Now try to think of a stylistic term that doesn't reference a sexual act. Unfortunately, "lying" doesn't count.
"Your aggressiveness in breaking, analyzing, investigating, exposing and reporting the news, fast and fearlessly, is only matched by the stylishness of your prose. Our readers have gobbled up every morsel of irony, hypocrisy, skewering wit and just plain sparkling writing that you’ve served up to lighten or just capture the mood."
And Dowd: "He was able to cajole, wheedle, charm, finagle, and yes, blarney his way into all sorts of places he wasn’t supposed to be to write the — I have to use my favorite adjective here — ensorcelling stories that put him on the journalistic map.”
During those long Trump rallies, with YUGE attendance, the 45th POTUS keeps them entertained. A standard stump speech just isn't doing it.
I watch my streamer movies with subtitles enabled. I discovered that, while in America we say "uh" instead of just pausing during speaking, those in the UK say "erm". Why is that?
It is true that Hilary started the "fake news" thing. Trumps genius was to use his comedic skills to turn it against the biased press. The press conference in which he told the CNN reporter that what they were slinging was "fake news," and then clarified that he mis-spoke; "Very fake news" was what he meant to say. That was a beautiful thing.
I can't read "hermeneutics" without thinking of Alan Sokal's epic hoax article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."
Got a chuckle from me too.
Winner
Too bad it's not possible to copy and paste “The Communist Manifesto”.
Sure it is. One can typically freely copy sections of Kindle books, for instance—then paste it wherever you want. But to post here on Blogger, you'd have to divide it into 4K max chunks. Plus our host Althouse might object—but I'm expect you could get away with posting a couple of chunks no problem…
Ebonics is the main language (dialect) of a substantial portion of the (D) voter base. Will proper English impress that base?
"Inga
Does he want to be understood? Or is it more pleasurable to him to just riff, blabber, and ramble? He wants to be president, shouldn’t he put some effort in being coherant?"
Our resident dullard, a strong supporter of first Biden and now Kamala, wrote this.
I think we should allow President Trump a certain "poetic license". Our generation's Ginsberg howling at the Deep State.
Ampersand - Igna does not have an original thought. She is a leftist loyalist, she follows orders from the left hive, and the endpoint of the left's misery will be ignored and the blame laid on others. New day - fresh new controversy manufactured by the corrupt left. Igna reporting for duty.
Or, ask the parents?
but but but - somehow the left think that a punk kid "Registered Republican" (why would a republican want to kill Trump?) is all the BS they need to lie about the fact that this troubled kid was a paid patsy - and that troubled paid-off kid murdered a Trump supporter. Curiously, the hack D press - do not care about that murder, and have nothing to say about it.
For the same reason that we say "ass" and they say "arse". They sound the same when spoken.
Aztec! Trump uses Ginsberg's stanza form.
So what, Inga? I don't care if Trump doesn't hit the groove with his style sometimes. Now give me something churlish about how he never gets on a roll or it all sucks anyway blah blah blah.
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