Literary Corner: The Weave

How Trump weaves his magic—it's the adjectives, stupid

Socially distanced Biden campaign rally at UAW Region 1 headquarters, Warren, Michigan, September 9 2020. Photo by Patrick Semansky, AP, via USA Today.

Eight Circles and He Couldn't Fill Tbem Up

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

I mean you can do whatever you want. I said
I don't like that. Lo and behold I see
they went and then built a plant and now
they do their business with India. They probably
do it outside India, too. They built
a very big plant. Many countries do that.
All of a sudden you hear they're leaving Milwaukee
or leaving wherever they may be located.
It's very sad to see. And it's so simple,
This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships
that land within 12 inches on the moon
where they want it to land or he gets the engines back.
That was the first I really saw. I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’
I saw engines about three or four years ago.
These things were coming. Cylinders, no wings,
no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly,
landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean,
someplace with a circle. Boom. Reminded me
of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?
He’d have eight circles and he couldn’t fill them up.
But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote.
I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the circles.
I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful.
That was so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person
that did them, that was the best thing about his —
the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t
get people, so they used to have the press
stand in those circles because they couldn’t get
the people. Then I heard we lost. ‘Oh, we lost.’
No, we’re never going to let that happen again.
But we’ve been abused by other countries. We’ve been
abused by our own politicians, really, more than
other countries. I can’t blame them. We’ve been
abused by people that represent us in this country,
some of them stupid, some of them naive,
and some of them crooked, frankly.

From Trump's remarks at the Detroit Economic Club, October 10 2024. The opening bit is from a story Trump has been telling for years, about the injustice of India having a 100% tariff on motorcycles, which was meant, I think he believed, to harm the US motorcycle industry, as Washington Post's Annie Gowen wrote in 2018:

Trump accused India of selling “thousands of thousands of motorcycles, which a lot of people don’t know, from India into the United States. You know what our tax is? Nothing.”

Problem is, the number of motorcycles imported from India into the United States is minimal. India’s Royal Enfield brand has dealerships in the United States and sells about 1,000 of its high-end bikes a year, according to Cartoq, but “motorcycles” don’t even merit a mention in the Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry's most recent data on exports to the United States.

What was actually at issue was Trump's tariff war on Europe, which caused the EU to impose retaliatory tariffs of 31% on US motorcycles, which caused the Harley-Davidson company to close a factory in Kansas City and plan to continue shifting production to Brazil, India, and Thailand, which hurt Trump's feelings

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not only because he's an ignorant fool but also because he's completely incapable of recognizing that he's responsible for it, and he's always "said nice things" about Harley, just as he has about the US farmers injured by his tariff wars on Europe and China. India, meanwhile, had already reduced the 100% tariffs to 75% and then 50% and Harley's India operation never sold more than a few hundred bikes per year in the United States, as The Times reported:

Mr. Trump’s single-minded focus on Harleys has mystified trade experts in both countries.

“Harley-Davidson is not going to erase the trade deficit,” [trade economist Sreeram] Chaulia said. In the context of the $126.2 billion in overall trade between the two countries, Harleys are not even a rounding error. Passenger jets, oil and gas, gemstones, and foods like almonds and chickpeas are far more important products.

Oh, and in 2020 Harley decided to close the India plant (not an imaginary one in Milwaukee) because it was doing badly in the Indian market (where tariffs on imported US parts and sales taxes made the prices too high on the mostly low-end bikes they sold in that country), but Trump is still talking about it four years later.

I can't determine what it is that Trump thinks is "so simple" about this, but it clearly made him think that it's not rocket science, which inspired him to move on to Musk and the SpaceX recyclable rocket hitting their landing platforms, which I'm ethically obliged to say is extremely impressive and cool in spite of its financial association with Elon Musk.

SpaceX Falcon 9 landing via All About Circuits.

which in turn prompted his irrepressibly leaping brain to move on to the 2020 presidential election which he couldn't possibly have lost, because Joe Biden's rally crowds often didn't have very many people—not because he "couldn't fill them up" but because of the Democrat's insistence on respecting the need for social distancing in the COVID pandemic, while Trump, of course, was perfectly happy to expose as many people to the virus as he possibly could, which is one reason why we still hold him responsible for a very large proportion of the first million US Covid deaths. The difference between Trump's idea of what was going on at those Biden rallies—his apparently unfeigned admiration of the design and his total incomprehension of the purpose (which would have been defeated, obviously, by stuffing possibly infected journalists into the circles, meant precisely to be inhabited by just one person) is very remarkable, as is a hilariously deadpan "fact check" of his argument by Reuters:

VERDICT

Missing context. The comparison of these images is misleading because it does not consider the candidates’ different approaches to campaigning during the pandemic.

At which point Trump seems to have realized how far afield he's gone and wrestles himself back, I think this time without the help of the teleprompter, with the litany of "We've been abused," traveling from the "other countries" and their tariff policies (he sort of remembers where he was before the rockets) to the politicians and the adjectives ("stupid" for Kamala Harris, "naive" for I'm not sure whom, "crooked" for the opponent of whom he feels he was improperly deprived) in which the force of his campaign chiefly resides. It's really about the adjectives, stupid.

This has been an example of the literary technique Trump has referred to as "the weave".