Meandering? Off-script? Trump insists 'weave' is oratorical genius

Biographer says Trump pretends there is some strategy or logic behind his ramblings

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For weeks, advisers to former US president Donald Trump have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message.

But on Aug 30, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.

"You know, I do the weave," he said. "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, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, 'It's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen."

Asked for examples of the technique, the Trump campaign provided what it called a "masterclass weave" - a four-minute, 20-second video of the candidate speaking at a rally in Asheville, North Carolina, in August in which he bounces from energy bills to Hunter Biden's laptop to Venezuelan tar to mental institutions in Caracas to migrant crime to "the green new scam" to Vice-President Kamala Harris.

In its disjointed way, it did all sort of seem to wend back to why he thinks he should be president again.

"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," said Ms Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump. "Kamala Harris could never."