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Critics may be quick to write off Donald Trump’s meandering monologues and inability to succinctly articulate a party line as a major flaw.
But what is actually happening is the “most brilliant thing” academics have ever seen, the former president himself has claimed.
On Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, he divulged what he claims to be his newly-coined strategy for the first time: the weave.
“When I do the weave... you know what the weave is?” Trump asked the crowd.
“I’ll talk about nine different things and they all come back brilliantly together,” he continued, waving his arms and interlocking his fingers.
Trump has long had a knack of making simple phrases rambling or extraordinarily complicated.
In January, for example, he once described using an iron dome missile defense system as “ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding… Boom. Okay. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom.”
Now, he is trying to spin his wordy responses and long, disjointed speeches as an intentional tactic.
Trump’s advisors, senior Republicans and MAGA followers alike are pleading with the former president to peddle concise political messaging and stop rambling off script.
“Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her positions,” former speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy told Fox News last month.
While devout Trump supporter Frank Scavo told The Guardian: “Trump’s got to focus on the message and not get distracted by personal attacks.”
The Republican presidential nominee, however, believes that his dissenters are mistaken and insists that he’s “not rambling” at all.
“Friends of mine that are like English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing they’ve ever seen,’” he said of the weave on stage on Friday.
“But you know the fake news, you know what they say: ‘He rambles.’ It’s not rambling.”
While he didn’t disclose which English professors that complimented his linguistic abilities, Trump did reveal just how the weave works.
“What you do is you go off a subject, mention another little tidbit. And you get back onto the subject,” he explained. “You go for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.”
But not everyone is convinced by his claim.
On Tuesday morning, MSNBC’s Morning Joe hosts burst into fits of laughter while breaking down Trump’s “brilliant” political strategy.
“That’s Donald Trump telling a crowd in Pennsylvania the other day, rambling, when it was actually part of a brilliant strategy,” said Willie Geist as co-anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski giggled.
“He lays it out like he’s from A Beautiful Mind; he’s seeing things the rest of us don’t see.”
Trump biographer Tim O’Brien also took to X last week to deliver his own breakdown.
“Translation: ‘I call it ‘The Weave.’ Everyone else calls it ‘Word Salad’ or ‘The Crazy,’” he wrote.
The Independent has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.
Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt brushed the comments aside telling The New York Times that Kamala Harris could never craft a political narrative or “impressive stories” like him: “Unlike Kamala Harris, who can’t put together a coherent sentence without a teleprompter, President Trump speaks for hours, telling multiple impressive stories at the same time.”
