One of my main takeaways from the Joe Rogan interview was a greater appreciation for Donald Trump’s unique rhetorical style, which he has recently referred to as “the weave.” It is diametrically opposed to Kamala Harris’s style, which some have described as “word salad” but I prefer to call “vapid filibustering”—vapid because it’s meaningless and filibustering because it’s both incessant and designed to forestall further discussion.

With the obviously senile Joe Biden out of the race, the legacy media has taken to implying that Trump’s “meandering” or “rambling” way of speaking somehow shows that he, too, is “losing it.” But as we learned from listening to his conversation with Rogan, that is far from the truth. In fact, his frequent apparent digressions and side trips down rabbit trails evince a very sharp mind, especially since he’s usually operating (as in the Rogan episode) without notes.

It's true that Trump can sometimes appear to be rambling, but only if the interviewer interrupts him, changes the subject, or doesn’t allow him time to finish his answer. Rogan graciously gave him that time. And so what we saw was this: Trump will begin answering a question, then veer off on some seeming tangent—and then perhaps another one, and another—but in the end he brings all the threads back together to make the point he set out to make. Hence, “the weave.”

This requires a tremendous amount of mental acuity and concentration, as I know well from personal experience. As a lecturer myself, I’m also prone to the occasional digression, and I must confess: sometimes, though not often, I lose my train of thought. Trump almost never does.

Indeed, as a history buff, hearing him speak in these long-form interviews, I am strongly reminded of the great Civil War historian Bruce Catton. Catton will begin by discussing, say, a particular battle, in the course of which he mentions some obscure officer, and then suddenly he’s off on a three-page narrative exploring that individual’s personal history, complete with one or more colorful anecdotes. His entire books are like that, and the style can be a little frustrating until you realize that a) he has a point, and he’s always working toward that point, even if perhaps in a roundabout manner, and b) it’s those stories that make the books so readable and memorable. They bring the history to life.

Trump’s weave is like that, too. He talks much the way Catton writes, but without the advantage of being able to go back and re-read previous pages.

Harris, on the other hand, talks the way many of my college freshmen write—as if she’s trying to turn 50 words worth of ideas into a 700-word paper. She constantly repeats herself, not only in every public appearance but within the same two-minute answer, even the same sentence. She litters her responses with high-sounding, polysyllabic words like “significance” and quasi-academic fillers like “in terms of.” And of course, she wastes no opportunity to flaunt her favorite Marxist catch-phrases, “do the work” and “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

Trump, far from being mentally deficient, talks as if he has so much to say, he can barely fit it all into the time allotted and thus seems to jump quickly from topic to topic. Kamala has nothing to say, yet she is determined to say it, anyway, ad infinitum, filling up whatever time she’s given with meaningless platitudes and tired cliches that don’t even address the issue at hand. And if anyone calls her on her non-answers, as Bret Baier and a few other interviewers have done, she quickly becomes petulant and confused. Unlike some of my bright but lazy students, who got through high school by BS-ing (only to find that doesn’t work in college), she doesn’t even seem to know she’s not making sense. She seems to think she’s being profound and can’t understand why everyone else doesn’t see it too.

Sure, Trump’s style can sometimes also be annoying, as we often just want him to get to the point. But that mild annoyance is nothing compared to the shivers of revulsion I feel every time Harris opens her mouth, with her whiny, nasal-y voice, her constant “up-talking” (finishing every sentence on a question mark), and her vapid, interminable non-answers. If she is elected president, and we have to listen to that for four or more years, we can only conclude that America’s sins are far greater than we had previously supposed, for that is a punishment right out of Dante’s Inferno.

Image: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr, unaltered.