How Trump talks: Abrupt shifts, profane insults, confusing sentences

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How Trump talks: Abrupt shifts, profane insults, confusing sentences
The Republican presidential nominee calls it “the weave” and a sign of a brilliant mind, but his remarks at recent public appearances have been strikingly erratic and coarse.

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By Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey
October 25, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

Donald Trump debuted a name for his idiosyncratic, digressive speaking style this summer: “the weave.” ... The Republican presidential nominee, now 78, was frustrated with news coverage describing his speeches as rambling and speculating about cognitive decline, according to people who have talked with him, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. ... Trump decided to brand his habit of going off on wide-ranging tangents as the mark of a vibrant and sophisticated mind, they said — trying to turn what many voters, and some of his advisers, saw as a weakness into a strength.

I call it ‘the weave. And some people think it’s so genius. But the bad people, what they say is, 'You know, he was rambling.” That’s not a ramble. There’s no rambling. This is a weave. I call it the weave. You need an extraordinary memory because you have to come back to where you started.
— Oct. 9 interview with Andrew Schulz on the “Flagrant” podcast

Trump’s recent public appearances have been strikingly erratic, coarse and often confusing, even for a politician with a history of ad-libbing in three consecutive presidential runs, a Washington Post review of dozens of speeches, interviews and other public appearances shows. His speeches have gotten longer and more repetitive compared with those of past campaigns. He promotes falsehoods and theories that are so far removed from reality or appear wholly made up that they are often baffling to anyone not steeped in MAGA media or internet memes.

He jumps more abruptly between subjects and from his script to improvising, sometimes offering what sound like non-sequiturs. He occasionally mixes up words or names, and some of his sentences are meaningless or nonsensical. As he delivered more speeches in October, he has made multiple slip-ups per day. He has become more profane in public.

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Trump spokesman Steven Cheung in an email praised the Republican nominee’s rhetoric: “President Trump is the greatest orator in political history and his patented Weave is a brilliant method to convey important stories and explain policies that will help everyday Americans turn the page from the last four years of Kamala Harris’s failures. The media is too stupid and ignorant to understand or comprehend what is happening in the country and, therefore, is unable to accurately report on President Trump’s achievements while in office and the pro-America agenda he will implement in his second term.”

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Sabrina Rodriguez, Marianne LeVine and Hannah Knowles contributed to this report.

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By Isaac Arnsdorf
Isaac Arnsdorf is a national political reporter covering the Trump campaign. His first book, "Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy," was published in 2024.follow on X iarnsdorf

By Josh Dawsey
Josh Dawsey is a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the paper in 2017 and previously covered the White House. Before that, he covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Wall Street Journal.follow on X @jdawsey1