Donald Trump recently claimed he doesn’t ramble during his speeches that cover everything from windmills and whales to batteries and sharks, and that he’s instead employing something called “the weave,” but experts don’t appear to be on board.
“You know, I do the weave,” Trump recently said at a political event. “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.’”
But one English professor has gone on the record to explain what Trump’s “weave” really is.
According to a New York Times report Sunday, “James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University and a renowned Shakespeare scholar, ruminated about Mr. Trump’s use of the word: ‘I read Trump’s comment bragging that ‘I do the weave.’ I take him at his word, as one of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of ‘weave’ is ‘to pursue a devious course.’”
Trump’s campaign reportedly didn’t identify any of the ex-president’s English professor friends, which lines up with what one prominent Trump critic has said.
Even Trump’s biographer called out the former president and his claim to have had English professors tell him his style is brilliant.
“I highly doubt that Donald Trump has any English professor friends,” Timothy O’Brien, a Trump biographer, said, according to the New York Times weekend report. “What this really reflects is that he is aware of the criticism that he is publicly saying nonlinear, nonsensical word salad, and he is trying to pretend there is a strategy or logic behind it when there isn’t.”
In Shakespeare, there is something close to what Trump is talking about, but it’s not a style that others try to emulate, according to those who know the writer’s works.
One expert, Drew Lichtenberg, a lecturer at Catholic University of America and an artistic producer at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, reportedly said that “the closest comparison to what Trump is talking about here in Shakespeare — fragments of unrelated subjects that are woven together — is, of course, Lear’s mad scene at Dover.”
Read the full report here.
