The NY Times notes that Trump’s Talk Gets Wilder. That’s one word for it; I can think of others.
He can be forgetful and repetitive. He is more long-winded, more profane and more absolutist than when he ran for president a decade ago. His rambling speeches seem even more garbled at times. He makes comments that leave people wondering what he is talking about or that sound like he is saying something he is not. And even for a president who has never fully observed the norms of the office, he seems more willing to say things no other president would say.
Welp that may be the euphemism of the week. Foul-mouthed rageaholic vulgar Trump has “never fully observed the norms of the office” – or the norms of any halfway reasonable person over the age of 3.
He declared that at an unfenced construction site “only a Hispanic could survive that fall.” He wants to ban immigrants from Norway “because I didn’t get the Nobel Prize.” He says “I don’t give a damn” if he is seen as caring more about oil company profits than struggling workers. He mispronounces the Strait of Hormuz as the “Hormone Strait.” He has told supporters to “cheat like hell” in the Nov. 3 elections. He says military leakers “should be shot.” And then there is his baffling fixation with admiring men’s posteriors.
Weird to add that last sentence so that it defuses the horror of the two before it.
For Mr. Trump, making sense often places second to having fun at rallies, and some outrageous remarks appear aimed at generating a laugh. His allies say too much is made of comments that are really just jokes. He has always been a provocative speaker, willing to outrage for the sake of outrage. Mr. Trump defends his stream-of-consciousness rambling as a “brilliant” speaking style that he calls “the weave.”
His allies should be reminded that it’s not his job to make fucking jokes. He’s not Ricky Gervais, he’s the guy who can send the nukes.
But the weave seems to be getting weavier. An A.I.-assisted New York Times review of Mr. Trump’s comments from speeches, rallies, social media, interviews and public meetings found significant changes since he began a run for president at age 69 in 2015, although not as much of a notable shift since 2024 when a similar review was conducted. Broadly speaking, the review concluded, Mr. Trump’s public communication is more vulgar, more uninhibited and less coherent than it was a decade ago.
Not surprising. One, he’s a bad person, so there’s nothing within him that would make him go in the other direction. Two, he has the biggest platform possible so what’s he gonna do, waste it? Of course not!
The review, relying on an A.I.-assisted metric, found that he makes rambling or confusing digressions in his rallies and speeches two and a half times as often in his second term as in the 2016 campaign, although roughly the same as in 2024. His vocabulary remains about the same, as does the reading level of his speaking, which hovers between fourth and fifth grade. (The average modern president speaks at an eighth-grade level.)
I’m guessing the eighth-grade level is deliberate: when you’re addressing the whole population you don’t want to pitch it too high. Fourth, on the other hand…
Mr. Trump appears sensitive to the perception that he is slipping, bringing up his cognitive tests without being asked at a half-dozen recent rallies. In Chillicothe, Ohio, on Wednesday night, he called himself “a very high-IQ person,” offered an extended description of the tests and compared his brainpower to that of former Presidents Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Who can spot the problem there? Besides everyone? Intelligent people don’t say things like that. Intelligent people understand how it comes across, so they don’t do it.
While Mr. Trump has been known to nod off during White House meetings, he draws energy from crowds when he is on the road. He speaks and speaks and speaks — twice as long as in 2016, according to the Times review, for an average of 85 minutes per rally compared with 42 minutes a decade ago.
There it is again. It’s not president he wants to be, it’s a standup comic. It’s just that being president gives him lots of opportunities to be an amateur standup comic, opportunities he would not get any other way.
His exhortations to supporters to vote have grown more vulgar and violent as well. “If you do that,” he said in Vandalia, Ohio, “we’re going to win and we’re going to win big. And we’re going to shove it up their ass, OK?”
Brilliant juxtaposition there. “His exhortations to supporters…And we’re going to shove it up their ass, OK?”
These days, even Mr. Trump seems aware that eyes are on him, watching and waiting. “I love the weave,” he told the midterm Republican convention in Dallas in September. “You know what the weave is? You talk about something, then you bring in a ballroom or you bring in an airplane or you bring in Air Force One. But you notice I always get right back to the same topic.”
And yet, he went on, “when someday, there’ll be a time when I do the weave is weave, weave. Someday, there’ll be a time when I don’t get back to the original subject, and then you can say he’s had it. OK? You can say then he’s had it.”
We can say it.
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