Donald Trump often doesn’t know what he’s talking about and no one else does either. But when he talks, people still listen, trying to make sense out of streams of nonsense. Like Homer’s sirens, it’s impossible to tune him out. He lures you, sentence fragment by sentence fragment, into his maelstrom of mystification.
The words go round and round. But they often don’t connect to each other in any coherent sequence. Sometimes the verbs are missing and subject collides against object, creating a cascading wreck of run-on sentences.
To exacerbate the confusion, the words Trump uses don’t necessarily mean the same thing to him, they do to you. Thus, what he says is often not precisely what he means. Trump has a gift for imprecision.
He contradicts himself compulsively, week to week, day to day, hour to hour, sometimes in the same breath. Donald Trump operates inside his own negative dialectic.
Sometimes Trump abandons words altogether and emits only grunts, growls, hisses and snorts, his only real connection to the Animal Kingdom.
So how does one detect the truth of what he says?
He’s easily triggered. He speaks on impulse. But where are the triggers? What are the impulses? Do the warps and perversions of Trump’s crude patois erupt from his subconscious? Or has Trump’s subconscious completely floated to the surface now and we are hearing directly from the fractured idiom of his Id? A terrible thought to be sure.
But not everyone is confused, even when Trump’s ramblings are at their most bewildering. Somehow, the message gets through to those who are attuned, even if the real message lurks beneath the stream of words he is speaking. With Trump, the messenger is the message and regardless of the subject, the message, flashing like a metronome from the chthonic depths, always asserts the same subliminal themes of power, grievance, retribution, whiteness, and superiority.
Trump isn’t speaking in code so much as he is connecting at an instinctual level to a network of cultural affinities, prejudices and insecurities that exist beyond grammar and etymology and without which Trump and his followers would be lost.
As it stands, though, it is we who are lost, trapped in language and rationality, unable to interpret the dark currents that Trump’s otherwise abstruse asseverations send coursing into some of the more reactionary precincts of the Republic.
Here then is a sampler of some of Trump’s most perplexing pronouncements over the last year. Good luck mining the meaning from the madness.
