The Trump weave
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The Trump weave is a description of John Kiriakou's speaking style, coined by someone at a speakers' bureau he had signed with and repeated by him on the DeProgram programme in August 2025.

Preparation, or the lack of it

The subject arose when a viewer asked both hosts whether they researched before appearances. Kiriakou's answer was that he does not, and that the reason is fatalistic rather than lazy: "I almost never prepare, because I figure if I don't know these issues by now, I'm never going to know them."

He named one exception then pending, a speech in New York at a hackers' convention. "I'm not a hacker and tech is not my strong suit necessarily, so I'm preparing for this one, but only to make references to like Vault 7 and stuff that the CIA has been doing. But yeah, otherwise, no, I don't prepare."

His view of over-preparation is that it is worse than none. He allows "some bullet points that you want to talk about, if you need a card to remind you, great. But just know the topics."

The weave

The consequence was noticed by a professional. "One of the guys at the speakers' bureau that I had signed with a while ago said that I did the Trump weave. Like I'd start one story and then take a side road into another story and I end up coming out, you know, completing the story, but I do the weave."

Kiriakou attributes the pattern directly to his method: "it's because I don't write anything down. I just walk up to the podium and start talking."

Its defence

The host argued the case for it, that the digressive style is more entertaining and that the fixed stump speech is "dead", and Kiriakou agreed: "that's true. That's absolutely right."

The habit is visible across the corpus of Kiriakou's appearances, in which an answer to a narrow question frequently opens into an unrelated anecdote before returning, and it is one reason his tellings of the same story vary in detail from occasion to occasion.

See also

- Vault 7
- The O'Reilly exclusivity rule
- Piers Morgan
- John Kiriakou
