If Joe Biden had been as manically inarticulate as Donald Trump was during his nearly two-hour White House press briefing Tuesday, or during his roughly 90-minute speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, there (rightfully) would have been widespread calls to remove him from office via the 25th Amendment. Had it been Biden, there may even have been calls to impeach him for threatening to take another war action against a sovereign state (a NATO ally!) without congressional consultation. But because it’s Trump, who is forever graded on a curve when it comes to everything from corruption to coherence, his nonsense earns begrudging kudos of genius.
Trump, on the campaign trail in 2024, dubbed his extemporaneous speaking style “the weave,” saying, “I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together.” To put it clinically, that’s equine manure. There’s nothing brilliant about his nasty, meandering monologues. Trump’s stream-of-consciousness brain droppings ought to be called what they are: the bitter and bigoted ramblings of a seemingly mentally deteriorating, elderly narcissist.
Despite that, Tina Brown wrote Wednesday, “Hand it to Trump. His surreal gift is the ability to force the entire world to enter his mad, magical thinking and give it serious credence.” In fact, this hands far too much to Trump.
Because it’s Trump, who is forever graded on a curve when it comes to everything from corruption to coherence, his nonsense earns begrudging kudos of genius.
We give Trump serious credence because he’s the president of the United States. And during the four years of the past decade when he wasn’t president, we gave his ramblings serious credence because he was still the Republican standard-bearer. Although he attempted a self-coup, he wasn’t convicted and barred from office at his second impeachment, in great part because then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is a coward. That failure of the Republican caucus to hold Trump accountable allowed him to run for president again and maintain his cult of personality-grip on the Republican voter base. He had such a grip that he didn’t even bother showing up to any of the 2024 GOP primary debates and never had his front-runner status remotely threatened by the competition.
He’s the twice-elected president. And he’s proven that Americans will vote for a convicted felon, insurrectionist, abject racist and aspirant authoritarian if they’re pissed off enough about inflation, illegal immigration and “wokeness.” Trump has earned our attention.
And he’s learned well — with Supreme Court validation — that the law literally doesn’t apply to him. That affords him even greater confidence to spit nonsense and have his sycophants call it gold, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should feel compelled to sanewash his imbecility or respect his sick clownery as a kind of “mad genius.”
Just read Trump’s actual words and try to ascribe any intelligence to “the weave.”
Over a roughly three-minute stretch of his Tuesday presser, Trump bashed former President Biden’s border policies: “You know, if you didn’t have open border policies of Biden, none of this — all of the things that we — all of the time that we spend talking about Minnesota and everything else, most of them are coming from out of the country.”
Then he pivoted to Americans protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s brutal incursion into Minneapolis: “Minnesota, the crime is incredible. The financial crimes are incredible. And the problem is because of the agitators and insurrectionists, whatever you want, troublemakers. But they’re — they’re paid agitators and insurrectionists.”
If this were your grandfather, you’d double-check he took his medication and hide his car keys.
He followed that with a racist rant against Somalis: “They’ve taken it, Somalians. Can you imagine? And they don’t do it. A lot of very low IQ people, they don’t do it. Other people work it out and they get them money, and they go out and buy Mercedes-Benzes. And they come from here. They have no money. They never had money. They never had a life. They never had a government. They never had a country because there’s basically no country. Somalia is not even a country. They don’t have anything that resembles a country. And if it is a country, it’s considered just about the worst in the world.”
And then back to Biden’s border policies, with a few shots at Rep. Ilhan Omar (“She never had a job. She’s a crooked congressman”), and trans women in sports thrown into the mix (“You know, men in women’s sports is dumb, but to me having an open border for the world to come in, drug dealers and prisoners”).
There’s no “there” here. This isn’t even a list of grievances, just fragments of talking points relentlessly parroted on right-wing conspiracy theory podcasts. If this were your grandfather, you’d double-check he took his medication and hide his car keys. Trump’s shambolic speech in Davos was more of the same, only it was in the presence of heads of state and business leaders. When he wasn’t confusing Greenland and Iceland, he was delivering “Trump weaves” like the one that had him meandering between favored-nation drug pricing, tariffs and U.S. housing prices. “This is also national security we’re talking about. Not fair. We’re not going to subsidize the whole world. … So our drug prices are going to be coming down by a staggering 90%. Again, you could say 1,000%, 20% … depends on the way you want to figure it. But we’ll go with the way the fake news likes it better because it sounds … Can you imagine? A 90% reduction sounds much worse, but drug prices are going to be coming down tremendously in all the nations, and I appreciate them doing it. But they did it. In all fairness, without tariffs, I wouldn’t have been able to get it done… “Homeownership has always been a symbol of health and vigor of American society. … In recent years, Wall Street giants and institutional investment firms — many of you are here, many of you are good friends of mine, many of you are supporters — sorry to do this to you, I’m so sorry — but you’ve driven up housing prices by purchasing hundreds of thousands of single-family homes, and it’s been a great investment.” The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols gave a rational assessment: “No one can be watching this Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and extremely dangerous.” It’s completely reasonable to credit Trump’s talents for demagoguery and staying out of prison. But lauding his talent for making the world dive into his “mad, magical thinking” is a choice. It is not reasonable to sanewash his inexcusable blather, and we shouldn’t do it.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW. 
