Mencken, H L

Former President Donald J. Trump’s speeches often wander from topic to topic. He insists there is an art to stitching them all together.For weeks, former President Donald J. Trump’s advisers have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message.But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “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, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”Asked for examples of the technique, the Trump campaign provided what it called a “masterclass weave” — a four-minute, 20-second video of the candidate speaking at a rally in Asheville, N.C., in August in which he bounces from energy bills to Hunter Biden’s laptop to Venezuelan tar to mental institutions in Caracas to migrant crime to “the green new scam” to Vice President Kamala Harris.In its disjointed way, it did all sort of seem to wend back to why he thinks he should be president again.“Unlike Kamala Harris, who can’t put together a coherent sentence without a teleprompter, President Trump speaks for hours, telling multiple impressive stories at the same time,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump. “Kamala Harris could never.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More