For those who have been surprised by Donald Trump’s convoluted rhetoric at his recent political rallies, such as electrocution, bacon sales and cannibal killers, the former US president has an explanation.
Trump assured supporters in Pennsylvania on Saturday that what appeared to be incoherent ramblings, with his frequent deviations from his scripted speeches, were actually indicators of his brilliance that impressed other great minds.
“I do the knitting. Do you know what knitting is? I’m going to talk about nine different things that all come together in a wonderful way. And my friends who are like English professors say, ‘It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,'” she told the stunned audience.
“But fake news, you know what they say, ‘He’s screwed up.’ That’s not screwing up. What you do is you go off topic and you go to another little detail and then you come back to it and you do that for two hours and you don’t mispronounce a word.”
But more and more people, even his own supporters, remain unconvinced.
Trump has a long history of deviating from written speeches, with words in teleplays triggering digressions and digressions, and Trump follows and embellishes them. But Timothy O’Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, said Trump’s public speaking style is now the subject of scrutiny and unease about his mental acuity — in some ways that Joe Biden has faced and that ultimately cost him his reelection bid.
What we are seeing now is the reflection of someone who is very distressed and very desperate.
Tim O’Brien
“The reason he’s now making these complicated statements about his speech patterns in his public appearances is because he’s very aware that people are noticing that he’s talking less rationally than he used to,” she said. “What we’re seeing now is a reflection of someone who’s very distressed and very desperate.”
Recent examples of Trump allegedly piecing together complicated explanations include his repeated references to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibalistic serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs, when discussing immigration. Trump has frequently and falsely claimed that foreign governments are emptying their prisons and “mental institutions” and sending their former residents across the U.S. border to commit crimes. Trump then moves on to refer to the sociopath he called “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” whom he surprisingly described at a rally as “a great man.”
Trump was asked in Wisconsin last week what he would do to “make life more affordable and lower inflation.” Trump turned the question into another opportunity to rail against green energy by theorizing that Biden’s expansion of wind energy was raising the cost of electricity and fueling inflation, which Trump said had pushed the cost of bacon out of reach for many average Americans.
“You look at bacon and some of these products, and some people don’t eat bacon anymore. We’re going to lower energy prices. When we lowered energy, you know, it was because of their terrible energy – wind, they want wind everywhere. But when the wind doesn’t blow, we have a little problem,” he said.
There is no evidence that these are connected, other than it being in Trump’s head. Also, demand for bacon has not dropped significantly. Trump has previously claimed that wind farms are what’s driving whales “crazy.”
To O’Brien, this is a classic Trump case, as he makes digressions filled with false claims to avoid due scrutiny.
“He’s a serial liar and a serial storyteller. A lot of them come out and by the time you start corroborating one statement or one story, eight of them have already come out. I don’t think it’s strategic, I just think Trump being Trump. It protects him from further accountability because it wears down the people who are trying to deal with him,” he said.
Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of political rhetoric at Texas A&M University and author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, said Trump sees his meandering ways as a strength, to the point where he has publicly disparaged advisers who have told him not to do it.
“He sees himself as a free-speaker, unscripted and unprompted. He wants to enjoy the crowd. Another part of that may be that his brain is not very disciplined and he can’t sustain a thought and reach its logical conclusion,” he said.
But Mercieca said he is aware that Trump’s digressions are increasingly raising questions about his mental competence to be president — an accusation he once made against Biden. He said that has put him on the defensive.
“Donald Trump is not a good businessman, but he’s very good at marketing and branding, and so anything that might be perceived negatively, he’s very good at marketing. He’s gotten a lot of flack lately for being blunt, for not having enough energy at his rallies, for not reading the teleprompter correctly, for mispronouncing words, and so his response has been to distort the subject. He says, ‘I have experts, friends, anonymous people, and they’re very impressed with my ability to weave,'” she said.
Trump’s speeches also appear more erratic when compared not with Biden’s stumbling campaign but with the much more consistent Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. What might once have been an advantage for Trump has become increasingly self-defeating, O’Brien said.
“It’s definitely doing more harm than good right now because Joe Biden no longer has a base to bounce off of. Biden has shrunk significantly and the media has been more ready to regularly call Biden to task on that. That’s allowed Trump to just walk right past him. He now has a different, younger, sharper, more vibrant political opponent, and I think that’s working for him because he often comes across as ridiculous or unbalanced or unfocused or very, very old,” he said.
Trump has a particular obsession with electric vehicles, a subject that returns even when it’s not the subject of his speech or debate. At a rally in June, he recounted a conversation he had with a boat manufacturer in which he predicted an electric boat would sink under the weight of the battery. Then he added a shark to the equation.
“Ben said, ‘What happens if the boat sinks because of its weight? What happens if you’re on the boat and you have this massively powerful battery and the battery is underwater right now and there’s a shark about 10 metres away?'” he told the crowd.
Trump said he asked the boat manufacturer whether it would be better to stand in the water next to the boat and risk electric shock from the battery, or to swim toward the shark.
“I’ll tell you, he didn’t know the answer,” he told the crowd. “He said, ‘You know, no one’s ever asked me that question.'”
Trump took this as a demonstration of the wisdom of his thinking, then told the audience that he would rather be electrocuted than be the victim of a shark, then returned to his original point: that he does not like electric vehicles.
“So we’re going to stop this, we’re going to stop this for boats, we’re going to stop this for trucks,” he said.
Trump was ridiculed for his shark remarks, prompting him to explain what he meant at another rally.
“You heard my story about the boat with the shark, right? I got killed there. They thought I was talking nonsense. I’m not talking nonsense,” he said.
“I had an uncle who was a wonderful professor at MIT for many years, I think it was the longest tenure he ever had. He was very smart, he had three different degrees, and, you know, so I have a talent for certain things. You know, there’s such a thing as talent.”
Trump later retold the story of the shark and the beating.
To some, the former president does little more than unleash a torrent of disconnected thoughts. Others see a logic in his performance, where a coherent pattern of thought can be discerned by connecting the dots he makes amid the digressions.
O’Brien said Trump uses his rallies as therapy sessions to work through his emotional and psychological issues on stage, and said it would be a mistake to try to extract too much meaning from his speeches.
“It’s a fool’s errand to try to find method in his madness. He’s so narcissistic and so privileged that he can stand in front of large crowds and say whatever comes to his mind. It frustrates his political advisors. It frustrates the Republican party,” he said.
“But it appeals to a base of 25% to 30% of Republican voters, as performance art. Not as public policy options or real-world solutions to their fundamental problems. It’s because they feel invited into this world through these absurd, non-linear pieces of performance art.”