Scientists have long wondered what the inside of the human mind looks like, and for most people the answer is complicated: a vast, humming library of memories, fears, half-remembered song lyrics, the smell of a grandmother’s kitchen, the capital of Montana, and the lingering suspicion that one left the stove on. For Donald Trump, the answer has been published, in installments, at rallies, for roughly ten years, and it turns out to be a small, well-lit room with twelve things in it, arranged in a circle, which he walks past in order, touching each one for luck.
He has a name for this. He calls it “the weave.” He has explained that he will talk about nine different things and they will all come back together, brilliantly, at the end, which is the same technique used by a Roomba, and with a comparable record of arriving anywhere in particular.
What follows is an inventory of the twelve things. It is offered in the spirit of science, so that future generations will know what was in the room.
The shark
The shark is the foundational object, the cornerstone, the thing around which the rest of the room was built, and it arrives almost always in the company of a battery.
At a rally in Las Vegas in June 2024, the President, then a candidate, described a conversation with a boat manufacturer in South Carolina about the danger of putting a heavy electric battery in a boat. What would happen, he wondered, if the boat sank under the weight of its own battery, and he was in it, and there was also, for reasons never established, a shark. He noted that there had been “a lot of shark attacks lately.” He then reasoned his way, aloud, in front of thousands of people, through the central ethical dilemma of his life, which is whether he would rather be electrocuted or eaten, and arrived at a firm conclusion: “I’ll take electrocution every single time.”
No boat manufacturer has ever confirmed the conversation. No shark has ever been involved in the sinking of an electric boat. None of this has troubled the story, which has been told with a sincerity that suggests he has thought about it in the bath, and it has made the shark the single most consistent presence in his public life, more consistent than any cabinet secretary, several wives, and the concept of a fixed tariff rate.
Hannibal Lecter
The second object in the room is a man, and the man is fictional, and the man eats people.
Trump brings up Hannibal Lecter with the warmth other politicians reserve for their high school football coach. At a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, in May 2024, he referred to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” which contains two errors, since Hannibal Lecter is neither late nor great, and is in fact a psychiatrist who ate a census taker with fava beans and a nice Chianti. Trump has described him as “a wonderful man,” invoked him in connection with immigrants he claims have been released from foreign mental institutions, and returned to him so often that his own campaign was eventually asked to explain it.
The movie is good, to be fair. It won Best Picture. It remains the only Best Picture winner whose lead character is currently receiving regular praise from a sitting head of state, and it would be interesting to know whether anyone has told the President how it ends.
The windmill
The windmill is the room’s great villain, and it is guilty of everything.
In 2019, speaking to Republican donors, Trump announced that the noise from windmills causes cancer. He has said they kill birds in such numbers that the ground beneath them is a “graveyard.” He has said offshore wind turbines are driving whales crazy. He has warned that if the wind stops blowing, a family can forget about watching television that night, a claim that assumes the power grid consists of a single windmill connected directly to one American’s living room.
He has hated windmills since at least 2012, when he began fighting a wind farm planned within sight of his golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, a fight he lost. That grievance has now been processed, over fourteen years, into a comprehensive theory of oncology, ornithology, and marine psychiatry, and it is the clearest example in the room of the Trump method, which is to take a personal inconvenience and slowly promote it until it becomes a law of nature.
The shower
The shower does not work, and this is personal.
“You turn on the shower,” he has explained, several times, and nothing comes out, or only a drip, and a man cannot get properly wet, and he in particular has “beautiful hair” that requires more water than the federal government is prepared to provide. He has described standing under a low-flow showerhead for what sounds like hours, getting damp but never clean, like a houseplant in a drought.
The toilet
The toilet shares a wall with the shower, and it is worse.
In December 2019, the President of the United States reported to the nation that people are flushing toilets “10 times, 15 times” because of efficiency standards. He did not say which people or how he knew, and he said it in a way that suggested he had sat in a focus group of Americans describing, in tears, their fifteenth flush.
The dishwasher
The dishwasher is the third member of the domestic trilogy, and it also betrays you.
In Trump’s account, a modern dishwasher does not have enough water, so you have to run it again, and again, and again, and by the end you have spent more water and more time than if you had simply washed the dishes by hand, which he has never done, and which he describes with the confidence of a man who has been briefed on the practice by an aide.
The magnet
The magnet is where the room becomes a matter of national defense.
For years Trump has objected to the electromagnetic catapults the Navy installed to launch jets off its newest aircraft carriers. He does not trust them. He has suggested that the system would fail if you dropped a glass of water on it. He has said you need to be Albert Einstein to understand it, which is his highest compliment and also his gravest warning. He prefers steam, which he understands, because it is what comes out of a kettle.
And here the room stops being a curiosity. On August 13 of this year, the President signed a national security memorandum ordering the Navy back to steam catapults on its Ford-class carriers, starting with the USS Doris Miller, which is already about half built. The contractor has warned of “significant cost, schedule, and integration risks.” A defense analyst at the Hudson Institute pointed out that the Navy has not bought a steam catapult in more than twenty years, which means the country will now have to reinvent an obsolete machine so that a warship can satisfy a man’s feelings about magnets.
The paper straw
The paper straw dissolves in your mouth, and this is an outrage.
He has described the paper straw’s collapse with real grief, the way the straw goes soft, then limp, then simply gives up, like a Republican senator. In February 2025 he signed an executive order to bring back the plastic straw. Asked, on one occasion, what he hoped to accomplish in the second year of his presidency, he began talking about straws.
The light bulb
The light bulb makes him look orange.
This is his own diagnosis. In 2019 he complained that energy-efficient bulbs are more expensive and that “the light’s no good,” and that “I always look orange.” The possibility that he looks orange for some other reason has, in the available record, never been raised with him in person.
Arnold Palmer
Arnold Palmer is in the room for one reason, and it is not his golf.
In October 2024, at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Arnold Palmer’s hometown, Trump spent the opening portion of his speech praising the late golfer’s strength and toughness, and then moved on to his memories of Palmer in the locker room shower, and to a specific part of Palmer’s anatomy, which he described with admiration to a crowd that had come to hear about the economy. Palmer’s family did not comment.
The ocean
The ocean is rising, and he regards this as good news for real estate.
On several occasions he has dismissed climate change by explaining that the sea level will rise by roughly an eighth of an inch over the next several hundred years, which would give Americans “more oceanfront property.” This is the room’s only example of optimism, and it is about flooding.
The man who called him sir
The twelfth object is a person, and the person is always a big, strong man, a tough guy, a guy who has never cried in his life, who walks up to Trump with tears in his eyes and says, “Sir.”
The man appears in stories about farmers, steelworkers, truckers, police officers, soldiers, and at least one construction worker, and he is always enormous, and always crying, and always calls him sir. He has never been identified, and he may be the same man every time, and he may be the shark.
The referendum
It would be unkind to point out that Trump turned eighty in June, and that repetition is one of the things people notice first when someone they love begins to change, and so this piece will not point it out, except to say that it has been pointed out, by many people, many times, and that he has responded by telling the shark story again.
The more useful thing to say is what the room does now.
For most of his public life, the twelve thoughts were entertainment, a kind of lounge act he performed between the parts of the speech that mattered. That is no longer true. The windmill became a stop-work order against offshore wind projects. The shower became an executive order in April 2025 titled, with no apparent irony, “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads.” The straw became an executive order. And the magnet has become a presidential memorandum that will redesign a warship costing more than ten billion dollars, already half built, because a man does not trust what happens when you drop a glass of water on something he has never seen.
The country has had ten years to study the room, and it knows what is in there, so the referendum that matters now is on everyone else, and on whether the rest of the government will keep turning what is in the room into policy, one riff at a time, until the United States Navy is launching fighter jets with a kettle and the only thing standing between the country and the shark is a battery he has already decided he would rather be electrocuted by.
I don’t think Hannibal Lecter minds the fat. Maybe he’s our last, best hope.
I've always believed he was capable of horrifying acts. This list substantiated my beliefs. I've heard him talk about each one of these. He needs to be in a mental hospital, not running our country. It's embarrassing, it's disgusting, it's horrifying.