Re: Trump’s incoherence. What’s feeding his head? I dunno. Maybe we should go ask Alice. I think she’ll know.
When logic and proportion/Have fallen sloppy dead/And the White Knight is talking backwards/And the Red Queen's off with her head/Remember what the dormouse said/Feed your head/Feed your head – From Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”
Hey, it’s easy enough to mock the former guy’s rambling rhetorical style, but voters should skip over the mockery and consider the serious ramifications of installing a president who can’t communicate or think in straightforward, interconnected ideas. Trump's rants are getting weird. Talk about logic and proportion falling sloppy dead, here’s a sample of his chronic inarticulation during a recent Florida speech, as reported in The New Republic, (which sub-headed its piece “try to make any sense of what Donald Trump said”):
“Mothers will never again be forced to watch their children overdosing in hosp … and we will never allow mothers to watch their child hopelessly dying in their arms screaming, ‘What can I do, what can I do? Help me God, what can I do?’ We are a nation whose once revered airports are a dirty, crowded mess. You sit and wait for hours and then are notified that the plane won’t leave, that they have no idea when they will. Where ticket prices have tripled. They don’t have the pilots to fly the planes, they don’t seek qualified air traffic controllers, and they just don’t know what the hell they are doing.”
There’s also a comprehensive compendium of Trump’s gibberish in The Guardian, which notes in its story that “excerpts from his speeches do not do justice to Trump’s smorgasbord of vendettas, non sequiturs and comparisons to famous people.”
More examples of Trump’s unhinged, non-sequential, all-over-the-map oratorical “style” can be found in utterance after utterance.
Nobody expects every candidate for the presidency to scale the oratorical heights of an Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a John F. Kennedy or a Ronald Reagan, but it’s reasonable to expect a leader of this country to be able to communicate with some grasp of logic and coherence, to be able to make a statement that has a connection between its beginning, its middle, and its end. Trump far too frequently can’t seem to do that, at least anymore.
It wasn’t always this way. I recall that he was generally able to hold it together during his time in office, but something in Trump’s thought process – at least as reflected in his rhetoric – seems to have gone awry since then.
Listening to Trump reminds me of Alice in Wonderland (illustrated above in a public domain image from wikimedia commons) when she encountered Humpty-Dumpty, who scornfully tells Alice, “when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
I imagine Trump feels the same way about his incoherent, gibberish-saturated harangues: they mean what he chooses them to mean. That the rest of us don’t have a clue as to what he’s trying to say must seem irrelevant to him. To Trump — who has to be deceiving himself into believing that what he’s saying makes perfect sense — the lack of understanding is our problem, not his.
All considered, this would be quaintly self-delusional if it weren’t so damn dangerous.
John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.
