New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman drew laughter from NPR host Dave Davies with a brutal takedown of former President Donald Trump’s insistence that his rambling rants are actually “brilliant.”
Media and political observers have consistently accused Trump of “rambling” — others have been less kind — in lengthy and scattershot monologues during rallies, but Trump has taken to defending the rants as unacknowledged “genius.”
At one rally, he coined a term for it: “The weave.”
On this week’s edition of NPR’s Fresh Air, Davies played that clip for Haberman and asked what she made of it. Her response drew a laugh from Davies as she torpedoed Trump’s suggestion:
DAVIES: Donald Trump is known at his rallies for going into long riffs and digressions, which can be a little hard to follow. Here’s a piece of tape in which he explains how he knows what he’s doing.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
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 — and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, it’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen. But the fake news, you know what they say? He rambled. That’s not rambling. When you have — what you do is you get off a subject to mention another little tidbit, then you get back onto the subject. And you go through this, and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.
DAVIES: Your thoughts?
HABERMAN: I don’t think he has friends who are English professors.
DAVIES: (Laughter).
HABERMAN: I don’t think that this is some intentional strategy. I think that he is aware that there’s a lot of questions about whether his speaking patterns have deteriorated, and he is just doing PR on that. I don’t think these various threads all weave together brilliantly toward the end. I listened to one of his rallies recently. I think it was Wisconsin a week and a half ago. And I was very struck by how meandering it is and has become, and that’s true. And again, it’s never – it was never not meandering, but he is going off on a lot of tangents these days. And I just think he’s trying to combat negative headlines by saying that.
DAVIES: You know, earlier this month in posts on social media, Trump threatened people he said would be cheating on the election and would be, quote, “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” which includes long prison sentences, adding that — adding, quote, “please be aware that this legal exposure extends to lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters and corrupt election officials.” You know, he says and writes a lot of angry stuff, but you thought this merited a story.
HABERMAN: I did, and he did it again this week. I think when he is promising to use the apparatus of the government against critics and opponents — and he’s talking about a wide range of people there — once he’s in office, I think talking about things that he says he will do when he’s elected is very different than, you know, him talking about doing the weave or sharks and boats and, you know, wind, farms and birds. It’s just not the same thing.
Watch above via NPR’s Fresh Air.