It's certainly not what is drawing attention to this thread, but Trump's ideas. However we should be aware that transcribing someone's speech with high fidelity 1°) will inevitably make them look dumb 2°) but only because we're not used to do this task, in fact our brains constantly do the opposite, fixing and filtering what we perceive in order to make out what is being communicated. You need some training to do that in fact!
Nonetheless, the author decided to included repair initiators ("uh") but not pauses, because I think he wanted to underline how dumb Trump sounds (pauses do not carry this connotation). This argument was used during the 2012 French presidential election against candidate Eva Joly (a prosecutor) in an attempt to tackle critics about her Norwegian accent on more objective grounds. Moving beyond right-wing gut-driven glottophobia, some people on the left thought they had found reasons to validate this criticism by examining improvised declaration she made during interviews through the filter of written transcription. I can accept this argument only if the author's article is a transcription of a spontaneous monologue (which is impossible of course).
Anyway I stress my point: we underestimate how messed up our actual linguistic production are. We're all too focused on the ideal of written language.
https://assets.cambridge.org/97811084/17211/frontmatter/9781...
>SPONTANEOUS SPOKEN ENGLISH
>A new, thought-provoking book on the theory of grammar and language processing, Spontaneous Spoken English is based on the analysis of authentic speech produced in real time. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology, neurology, and conversation analysis, the author offers a fascinating, easy-to-follow account of why spoken English is structured the way it is. The traditional product-based approach to grammar is given up in favor of a dynamic, speaker-based perspective that integrates language-structural, neurocognitive, and dialogic aspects of speech production. Based on fresh empirical research, Haselow argues that grammatical knowledge rests upon two cognitive principles of linearization called microgrammar and macrogrammar, which are shown to interact in various ways. The book discusses a broad range of speech phenomena under an integrated framework, such as the omnipresence of “unintegrated” constituents (e.g. discourse markers), ellipses, or the allegedly “fragmented” character of syntax, and explains the mechanisms of processing efficiency that guide syntactic planning.
>So, what does the neurotic want to know? I'm slowing my delivery here so you can hear clearly, as every single word is important. He wants to know what is real in that which is his passion – in other words, what is real in the effect of the signifier.
And I think this is exactly what Trump is on about. He wants to see for himself the effect of his own name as he utters it (hence the 3rd person). I don't think he came with that remark about "the weave" by accident. I think it was planned and "discussed" internally as the explicit, self-aware display of madness that would allow him to string this nonsense together, and by uttering it, absolve himself from the toxcicity of his own thought process and make it our problem – thus achieving the roaring effects he sought to find in the very name of Trump in the first place.
He really isn't anywhere near as coherent as the average person, and I'm not American, so I don't even have a dog in this fight. I've only heard him talk, and I usually can't make out any point at all, which I personally have very rarely encountered with the average person (for the sober ones, at least).