For those baffled by Donald Trump's meandering statements about electrocution, selling bacon or cannibal murderers at his recent political rallies, the former US president had an explanation.
Trump assured his supporters in Pennsylvania on Saturday that his rambling speech, as he frequently deviated from his planned speech, was instead signs of his genius, which impressed other great minds.
"I do the weaving. You know what the weaving is? I'll talk about, like, nine different things that all come together brilliantly. And it's like friends of mine who are like English professors, who say, 'It's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen,'" he told a stunned audience.
"But fake news, you know what they say, 'He was babbling.' It's not babbling. What you do is you change the subject to mention another little fact, then you go back to the subject, and you go through this and you do that for two hours, and you don't even mispronounce one word."
But more and more others are not convinced, including some of his own supporters.
Trump has a long history of deviating from written speeches, saying the words on the teleprompter prompt divergent thoughts and digressions that he then emulates and embellishes. But Timothy O'Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, said Trump's public speaking style is now the subject of criticism and concerns about his mental acuity - in some of the same ways that Joe Biden faced and ultimately cost him his reelection bid.
What we are seeing now is a reflection of someone who is in deep trouble and very desperate
Tim O'Brien
"The reason he's now giving these complicated explanations about his speech patterns in his public appearances is because he's hyper-aware that people have noticed that he's speaking even less logically than he used to," he said. "What we're seeing now is a reflection of someone who is very troubled and very desperate."
Recent examples of Trump's claim to be weaving together complex statements include repeated references to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibalistic serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, while discussing immigration. Trump frequently and falsely claims that foreign governments empty their prisons and "insane asylums" and send their former residents across the U.S. border to commit crimes. Trump then makes the leap to talk about the sociopath he calls "the late, great Hannibal Lecter," whom he described, astonishingly, at a rally as "a wonderful man."
Last week in Wisconsin, Trump was asked what he would do to "make life more affordable and lower inflation." He turned the question into another opportunity to rail against green energy, theorizing that Biden's expansion of wind power had driven up the cost of electricity and increased inflation. That, in turn, Trump said, had put the cost of bacon out of reach for many ordinary Americans.
"You look at bacon and some of these products and some people don't eat bacon anymore. We're going to get energy prices down. If we get energy prices down, you know, this was caused by their terrible energy - wind, they want wind everywhere. But if it doesn't blow, we're going to have a little bit of a problem," he said.
There is no evidence that these things are connected, except in Trump's mind. Furthermore, the demand for bacon has not dropped significantly. Trump has previously claimed that wind farms make whales "crazy."
For O'Brien, this is a classic example of Trump using digressions, riddled with false claims, to evade proper scrutiny.
"He's a serial liar and a serial fabulist. There's so much that comes out that by the time you fact-check one claim or story, eight others have already landed. I don't think it's strategic, I just think Trump is Trump. It protects him from greater accountability because it exhausts people who are trying to keep up 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 quirks as a strength, even going so far as to publicly ridicule advisers who tell him not to do them.
"He sees himself as someone who is not scripted and not teleprompted, and a free-spirited conversationalist. He wants to be able to feed off the crowd. Another part of it is that his brain is not well-disciplined and it could just be that he is not able to hold a thought and follow it through to its logical conclusion," she said.
Mercieca, however, said Trump was aware that his ramblings were raising increasing questions about his mental fitness to be president again - an accusation he once leveled against Biden. That, she said, has put him on the defensive.
"Donald Trump is not a good businessman, but he is very good at marketing and branding, and so he is very good at putting a marketing spin on anything that could be seen as negative. He has been criticized a lot lately for rambling, for not having much energy in his rallies, for not being able to read the teleprompter, for mispronouncing words, and so his response is to spin it. He says, 'I have experts, these friends of mine, anonymous others, who are very impressed with my ability to weave,'" she said.
Trump's speeches also seem all the more disorganized because they no longer stand in contrast to Biden's faltering campaign, but to a much more coherent Democratic presidential candidate in Kamala Harris. O'Brien said that what was once an asset for Trump has become increasingly self-destructive.
"It's certainly doing more harm than good at the moment because he no longer has the counterpart of Joe Biden to bounce off of. Biden was so visibly weakened and the media was more willing to call Biden out on it on a regular basis. That allowed Trump to slip past. Now that he has another, younger, sharper, more vibrant political opponent, I think it works for him because he often looks ridiculous or deranged or unfocused or very, very old," he said.
Trump is obsessed with electric vehicles, a theme he returns to even when it's not the subject of his speech or discussion. At a rally in June, he recounted a conversation with a boat manufacturer in which he speculated that an electric-powered boat would sink under the weight of its battery. Then he introduced a shark into the equation.
"I say, 'What would happen if the boat were to sink because of its weight, and you're in the boat, and you've got this huge, powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater, and there's a shark about 10 meters away?" he told the crowd.
Trump said he asked the boat's manufacturer whether it would be better to lie in the water next to the boat and risk electrocution 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, nobody's ever asked me that question.'"
Trump took this as a sign of his smarts and told the crowd that he would rather be electrocuted than fall victim to a shark, then returned to his original point: that he doesn't like electric vehicles.
"So we're going to put an end to that, we're going to put an end to it for boats, we're going to put an end to it for trucks," he said.
When Trump was widely mocked for his shark speculation, it only prompted him to further explain what he meant at another rally.
"You heard my story in the boat with the shark, right? I got killed in that. They thought I was rattling. I'm not rattling," he said.
"I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for many years, I think the longest tenure ever. Very smart, had three different degrees, and, you know, I have a knack for things. You know, there is such a thing as a knack."
Trump then retold the story about the shark and the attack.
To some, the former president does little more than unleash a torrent of disjointed thoughts. Others see a logic in his actions in which a coherent pattern of thought can be discerned by connecting the dots he makes between digressions.
O'Brien, who described Trump as someone who used his rallies as a therapy session to work through his emotional and psychological issues on stage, said it would be a mistake to try to make too much sense of his speeches.
"It's a fool's errand to try to find a method in his madness. He's someone who is so narcissistic and privileged that he's willing to stand in front of large crowds and basically free-associate about anything that comes to his mind. It frustrates his political advisers. It frustrates the Republican Party," he said.
"But it speaks to its base, which is somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of Republican voters, as performance art. Not as a menu of public policy choices or real-world solutions to their fundamental problems. It's simply because they feel like they're being invited into this world by these nonsensical, nonlinear pieces of performance art."
