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.[1]
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.”[2]
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.”[2][3]
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.”[1]
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.”[1]
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.”[1][4]
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.”[4]
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.