Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Donald Trump calls it the weave. As if he were some sort of golden-tongued orator carefully stitching together a tapestry of thought. In reality, it’s not a weave. It’s not even a tangle. It’s what happens when a Roomba gets trapped in a corner and just keeps bumping into the same wall until the battery dies. His “weave” is a mess of half-sentences, non sequiturs, and whatever Fox News chyron happened to be scrolling through his brain five minutes before he took the podium.

If your Uncle Donnie launched into one of these word salads at Thanksgiving, you wouldn’t nod politely. You’d quietly remove the carving knife from his hand and whisper to Aunt Carol to get the car running because you’re headed straight to the psych ward. Imagine it: you’re trying to pass the gravy, and Uncle Donnie starts in—“A lot of people don’t know, but gravy, very special gravy, the best, I had gravy, everybody said, sir, that’s the best gravy they’ve ever seen, no one has ever seen gravy like this, except maybe Abraham Lincoln, but Lincoln wasn’t that great with gravy, believe me, believe me.” At that point, you’re not thinking “presidential.” You’re thinking “adult supervision required.”

The so-called weave isn’t rhetorical strategy—it’s verbal whiplash. He jumps from immigration to lightbulbs to windmills killing birds to Hunter Biden’s laptop in the space of a single breath, and somehow thinks this qualifies as coherence. It’s like watching a drunk uncle try to tell a joke he doesn’t remember the punchline to, only stretched out for 90 minutes in front of a screaming crowd. The audience nods along, not because they understand, but because they’ve long since given up trying.

And the pauses. Oh, the pauses. He stares out, lips pursed, like he’s just delivered the Gettysburg Address, when in reality he’s just said, “People are saying we’re doing very, very strongly, maybe the strongest, some say ever, maybe not ever, but probably ever.” If Uncle Donnie did that at the dinner table, you wouldn’t clap—you’d confiscate the wine and start Googling “early signs of dementia.”

So let’s be honest. “The weave” is not brilliant branding for his speaking technique. It’s just incoherent rambling dressed up in a cheap suit. If anyone else spoke this way, you’d stage an intervention. But somehow, when Trump does it, his fans call it “refreshing.” Right. Refreshing in the same way eating paste is a refreshing sn