A Perfectly Reasonable Amount of Schadenfreude about Things Happening to Trump & His Enablers (Part 2)

Many people are saying that minority voters might not be too fond of Trump’s “Indian? Black? They’re pretty much interchangeable, right?” messaging.

I’ve shared that video on Facebook with a warning not to let it spread, because Trump hates being laughed at, and if it spreads all over the Internet it will make him sad.

Wow, I bet he really locked in the black vote with that performance.

He says the word, “black,” like Arjen Rudd in Lethal Weapon 2.

I’d love to see that, too! But better still, at least one person in the audience should be equipped with a concertina (technically the type of invisible accordion he appears to be playing) making the appropriate random notes as Trump moves the invisible bellows back and forth. :grin:

What an absolutely insufferable moron. Every time I think he can’t sink any lower, he manages to do it.

The best youtube comment…"He dug the biggest hole. Huge. Nobody has ever seen a hole this big. A man with a shovel came up to him with tears in his eyes and said “sir….”

Thank you.

It would be awesome if they all had accordians.

They’d make too much noise, for one thing. As soon as Trump heard them, he’d notice; and it might come across as trying to drown Trump out. Better to just mock him silently, see how long it takes him to realize what everyone is doing, and see what he does next. I don’t think he’s even consciously aware of this habit. Let him notice so he gets distracted and self-conscious. It might be enough to completely derail his train of thought (such as it is).

I just watched it all the way through. I’m surprised he didn’t call Kamala Harris “Pocahontas”. But he did say she’s not Black.

A question-why does he do the accordion thing? Did someone teach him it’s macho and how he does it all he wants? Is he subconsciously reaching for mommy?

It DOES remind me of a cat “kneading”

the behavior may be a remnant of a newborn’s kneading of the mother’s teat to stimulate milk secretion.

I always figure it’s some kind of salesmanship technique; he thinks hand gestures along with words are subconsciously more influential, or something like that. Whether he read it in Grifting for Dummies, or just picked it up during a lifetime of peddling snake oil, I don’t know.

But let us find ways to mock Trump and get in his head. Chances like that will be few and far between; he rarely speaks to a crowd that hasn’t already pledged its fealty.

It’s actually common for people to talk with their hands. I may have first heard about it in my Speech class in college [mumble] years ago. Here’s the first article that came up in a search:

I haven’t read the article. Just skimmed it enough to believe it is relevant.

In my mind, the accordion movements are saying ‘Look. What I’m saying is really simple. I know I don’t have to explain to you what I’m saying; but hey, here it is.’

ETA:

Yes, that’s pretty much it. We make many gestures when we speak, and they are meant to signal different things. ‘Hey, this is what I’ve got’ (accordion), or ‘This is exact’ (pointing on the desk), or ‘This is an important detail’ (picking an invisible thing with your thumb and forefinger), and so on.

I haven’t watched him lately, but he used to do a point / “ok” sign schtick repeatedly. I seem to recall from my Abnormal Psych studies (back in the dark ages) that such repetitive gestures are frequently indications of mental issues.

I’m from a culture that often speaks with our hands, it’s not even something I notice I’m doing until I accidentally hit a passerby (what, I’m clumsy!)

I’ve heard this joke a few times, with different people as the punchline.

A québécois/Italian/Frenchman/Trump goes fishing with a friend, but falls out of the boat.

“Help, I can’t swim!” they shout.

Their friend calls back “Just keep talking, you’ll be fine!”

OK, I’ve read it. (Short read, actually.) So yeah. This:

“More generally co-speech hand gestures are seen as a mechanism for emphasis and disambiguation of the semantics of a sentence, in addition to prosody and facial queues,” says Ghosh. “In fact, one may consider the act of speaking as one large orchestral score involving vocal tract movement, respiration, voicing, facial expression, hand gestures, and even whole body postures acting as different instruments coordinated dynamically by the brain.

I’m also from a culture where we talk with our hands and I take issue to our being compared with Trump, we use our hands to express ourselves, Trump only plays the accordion.

I have also observed that we tend to keep the same gestures we used growing up. I’ve seen video presentations by several of my former debaters. They still make the same gestures as they did in high school, 30+ years ago. I’m talking college professors here. So trump may have learned that gesture in his teens and just kept doing it all these years.

He’s like so many other people on that. I don’t mean the accordian bit; I mean the double threat of not knowing what to do with their hands and constantly using just one gesture. That legal eagle whose videos are often linked on the SDMB also falls into that category.

Trump, though, as his party’s candidate, should have someone telling him how distracting it is.

I assume Trump is casting a spell when he does the hand thing. It sometimes works on certain people.