The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman dismissed former President Donald Trump’s claim that his tangent-filled ramblings are actually part of a genius tactic that he’s dubbed, “The Weave.”

Trump recently told a 2024 campaign rally in Pennsylvania:

You know, I do the weave. 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, and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’ But the fake news, you know what they say? ‘He rambled.’

NPR’s Dave Davies played audio of those Trump comments to Haberman on the “Fresh Air” show. Haberman deadpanned in response, “I don’t think he has friends who are English professors.”

“I don’t think that this is some intentional strategy,” she continued. “I think that he is aware that there’s a lot of questions about whether his speaking patterns have deteriorated, and he is just doing PR on that. I don’t think these various threads all weave together brilliantly toward the end.”

Haberman was “very struck,” she said, by “how meandering” Trump was during a recent rally. “It was never not meandering, but he is going off on a lot of tangents these days. And I just think he’s trying to combat negative headlines by saying that.”

Listen to the full episode here: