Donald Trump Brags of ‘Very Fertile Brain’ While Defending Rambling Speeches

Donald Trump said he has a “very fertile brain” while defending his rambling speeches at a rally in Wisconsin on Friday.
The former president’s public addresses have seemingly become more disjointed and unfocused in recent months, something New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman raised on CNN’s The Source show last month.
In Milwaukee on Friday evening while responding to comments that his speeches are rambling, the former president said: “I have a very fertile, a very fertile, brain, but it’s the weave and we do it, this way you tell one story and you cover like 15 sub plots but you get down to the final answer.”
Previously in his speech, Trump had explained what he meant by “the weave,” which he described as a way of speaking that was part of telling a story.
The former president said: “They used to say, he rambled, I don’t ramble. I do a weave, you know what a weave is? It’s a story.”
The Republican nominee gestured with his hand to mimic a weave motion with his hand as he spoke.
“As you’re telling the story you realize there’s a little off shoot, but the key is you have to come back, then you’re telling the story and you get down to the bottom line and bom you do another weave, and sometimes you do a weave off a weave,” Trump added.
The clip was posted by the Harris campaign account on X, formerly Twitter, later that night, and has since accumulated more than 320,000 views.
At other points during his Milwaukee rally, the Republican presidential nominee acknowledged that some people have called him “cognitively impaired” and complained about issues with his microphone, threatening to “knock the hell out of people.”
At a rally in Michigan also on Friday, Trump talked about his “beautiful white skin,” while riffing about how running for president had prevented him from getting a decent tan.
There has been ongoing discussion over the past few months about Trump’s answers to questions and disjointed speeches.
In the middle of October, Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait interrupted Trump during an event at the Economic Club of Chicago, to remind him the question he’d asked was about tariffs and not wars, which Trump was discussing.
Answering a different question to the one asked was something Trump did a number of times in one interview, at one point talking about a Department of Justice voter roll lawsuit in Virginia when asked about breaking up Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
The former president’s estranged niece, Mary, also deemed Trump’s responses at the New York Economic Club in September “disjointed riffing,” when the Republican candidate suggested tariffs would lower childcare costs.
Commenting on his response, Mary said: “I defy anybody who was actually trying to follow the thread of that gibberish to tell me what it means. Nobody can.”
Newsweek contacted the Trump campaign out of hours via email for comment.
Update, 11/02/24, 12:21 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
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