Git Diagramming "The Weave"

Summary

We all know the current US President is one hell of an orator and often assures us that he has “the best words”: I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words. The man knows words. Says so right there. While some might view his non-sequitur ramblings as the nascent stages of dementia or an unfiltered ADHD brain launching into successive short (at times racist) bullet-point diatribes based on the last word or phrase he said like a cursed game of word association, the President asserts this is not the case: 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. “The Weave” re-entered my consciousness this week after I watched a quick snippet of an Oval Office event where Trump says the (“radical left-wing”) CBO projects tariffs will reduce the deficit by $4 trillion USD. I was skeptical –and for good reason– but I tuned in. What shocked me was not the complete lack of specifics about the CBO projection, but rather the actual reason for the Oval Office meeting: a FIFA event? Wow. For awhile now, I’ve clued into the cyclical pattern of his speeches, little snippets of “the best words” and talking points assembled like a ransom note cut from a magazine. I often wondered if it’s possible to diagram “the weave”. The “branching” narratives Trump uses made me think a git-graph-style visualization was apropos. So I grabbed a transcript and got to work. For my first attempt, I used Mermaid.js’ GitGraph Diagram which worked well but only supports horizontal charts. As I sat with it I realized I wanted a chronological list of statements that read like a transcript. I repurposed the Mermaid’s GitGraph DSL and made a web component called <git-graph> to help me visualize and document Trump’s derailing trains of thought ...