STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We have one perspective on the language of Donald Trump. For years now, the former president's blunt talk has won praise from supporters and from himself.
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DONALD TRUMP: I used to use the word incompetent. Now I just call them stupid. I went to an Ivy League school. I'm very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words. I have the - but there's no better word than stupid.
INSKEEP: In this campaign, the 78-year-old former president has faced questions about his rambling public statements, like his 90-minute convention speech or the answers in his much-criticized debate this week. At a recent campaign rally, Trump sought to explain his style.
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TRUMP: You know, I do the weave. 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 - and friends of mine that are, like, English professors - they say, it's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen.
INSKEEP: Some critics have framed the weave as a sign of mental decline. The linguist John McWhorter sees it differently. He is a professor at Columbia University and wrote about the weave in The New York Times.
JOHN MCWHORTER: The idea that Trump has that what he's doing is this kind of jaunty character trait called the weave is interesting. And he's not completely out of his mind on that, in that most of us are not as organized in how we manage topics in the heat of a casual conversation. I mean, casual speech is much less tidy than we often think. But when I listen to Trump, what I hear is a kind of verbal narcissism. And what I mean by that is that very often, the connection between point A and point B is something that's very difficult to understand. You have to almost parse it as if it was something in the Talmud, whereas it makes sense to him.
In other words, he can't be bothered to make the connection for us. He's not speaking to us, trying to communicate with us in any real way beyond, you know, the very primal aspect of it. He could be this way at 25. There are people who talk that way at 20. I don't think it's dementia. I think that it's a more elemental problem with his nature, which perhaps has gotten worse as he's gotten older, but I think it's less a matter of his aging than the fact that he knows he can get away with it.
INSKEEP: Trump was asked, what specific policy or law you would support that would be good for child care in America.
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TRUMP: But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I'm talking about, that because - look, child care is child care - couldn't, you know, it's something - you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I'm talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they're not used to, but they'll get used to it very quickly. And it's not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they'll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we're talking about, including child care.
INSKEEP: What did you make of that particular passage?
MCWHORTER: One, it displays that he's inside of his own head, where we have to work to understand why, suddenly, he's talking about tariffs. But then once you get that what he's saying is that we'll get so much money from tariffs that it'll take care of child care, there is a great deal of evidence that we would not make that much money from tariffs and that it wouldn't be a good thing for the individual taxpayer. And then, two, what you can see is that he doesn't know anything about the child care issue, and it's rather predictable that that sort of thing wouldn't interest him. But that passage alone is beautiful evidence, like a framed picture, of why he is unfit for office.
INSKEEP: I'm trying to think of the most sympathetic way to interpret this in the way that Trump seems to interpret it and put it to you so that you can respond. I suppose he may be thinking of himself the way that a stand-up comedian would. A brilliant stand-up comedian might do this, might have several plotlines that all come together at the end. Is that, in fact, what he may be doing?
MCWHORTER: (Laughter) No. I mean, what he's describing does sound rather deft, as if he's just juggling a whole bunch of things because perhaps he's such a fertile mind. But really, what happens is he thinks of a second, and that makes him think of a third. Then he has to make some off-handed remark. And then usually, he then jumps rather parenthetically back to the first thing. That's not weaving. That's rambling, the verbal equivalent of somebody being extremely drunk.
INSKEEP: John McWhorter is a linguist, a professor at Columbia University and an opinion writer for The New York Times. Always a pleasure to talk with you, sir.
MCWHORTER: Thank you, Steve.
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