Many, many Americans – and even some of your immigrants – come up to me on the street with tears streaming across their cheeks and down their chins and ask – very strongly – ‘Sir, should we really NOT believe what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears?’
Intimates chewing the fat about things mutually understood get the job done. But Trump, stringing together insights with no outwardly discernible connection, just chews his own fat.
Or bacon.
“You take a look at bacon and some of these products,” Trump said at a recent town hall in Wisconsin. “Some people don’t eat bacon anymore. And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down — you know, this was caused by their horrible energy — wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.”
Figuring out how wind power raises the cost of bacon takes some work.
As does the connection, in remarks last year, between shark bites and being electrocuted. “If I’m sitting down and that boat is going down and I’m on top of a battery and the water starts flooding in,” Trump said, “I’m getting concerned, but then I look 10 yards to my left and there’s a shark over there, so I have a choice of electrocution and a shark, you know what I’m going to take? Electrocution. I will take electrocution every single time, do we agree?”
It all made perfect sense — to him. Those who care to join him on these journeys are always welcome to do so, welcome to nod along or laugh at the punchlines. But he makes no effort to meet other people where they are.
That’s a cogent slice of an opinion column by John McWhorter – “What if I’m the ‘Friend’ Donald Trump Referred To?” (New York Times, Sept. 5, 2024)
And I have my own way of disorganizing thoughts. McWhorter opened his column with:
Donald Trump’s word-salad oratory has always been a distinctive feature of his public life, leaving some observers to grasp for a novel way to describe it. Last week Trump himself gave it a name, one that sounds kind of like a ’70s dance: “the weave.”
“You know what the weave is?” he asked the crowd at a rally in Johnstown, Pa. “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.’”
I wonder if somewhere in the recesses of his mind, one of those English professors is me, McWhorter wrote.
No friend of his am I (nor an English professor exactly — my field is Linguistics.)
Studied me some linguistics, too. I’m like an English professor. And I often use similar phrasing myself on X.com, where I am an active commenter. Don’t actually X much, but I do put in my own due sense once in a while. Maybe a dozen times a day. You can follow me @JACKDOGWELCH, but I wouldn’t suggest it. Not verified.
Sometimes I think Elon Musk is out to get me and not like John Beresford Tipton on that favorite 1950s TV show “The Millionaire” when a stranger played by Marvin Miller would come to the door and hand you a million-dollar check you had to keep secret, not a problem, right, but that’s where you’d be wrong, problems, big problems, which makes me wonder how big Kamala Harris’ lead would be if she was a white male from Yale.
Where was I? Weaving, that’s right. Do you remember Donald’s friend, Jim maybe, who always used to go to France, loved Paris, there’s a Paris in Texas, too, made an artsy flick there, “Best Little Whorehouse” was a better movie, so his friend doesn’t go to Paris anymore. Can’t even remember now why not. The fries are better at McDonald’s, anyway. Make Fast Food Great, that’s what I always say.
It’s a lot like that.
Can you imagine Donald as your life coach? No, you can’t.
You would not take advice from a guy like that. Even if you could understand him.
Did you hear what he said when asked a single serious policy question by one serious adult?
Asked if he would “commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable” and “what specific piece of legislation” he would support during a Q&A session at the Economic Club of New York Thursday, Trump said:
“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down. You know, I was somebody — we had, Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.
“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — that, because look, child care is child care, couldn’t — you know, there’s something — you have to have it in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to. But they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country.
“Because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just — that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars. And as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers will be taking in.
“We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people. And then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about make America great again. We have to do it because right now, we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.”
The words speak for themselves.
McWhorter’s bottom line – Trump’s “weave” can be amusing, but it is yet another attribute that proves him — almost every time he opens his mouth — to be unfit for office.
Yeah, “amusing” like somebody barfing on your most expensive tie.
My practically penultimate line – Imagine Trump as your neighbor. Not the guy you’d give your key to, in case of emergencies. You wouldn’t let him borrow your car or hold your wallet or guard your daughter or take your first-born son on a college tour.
You wouldn’t let this demented dude spouting gibberish coach anybody about anything. Least of all, Life.
Would be weird if you did. I think we can all agree.
