Donald Trump kept his Montana rally crowd waiting for nearly 90 minutes Friday night and then immediately insulted the state. Scheduled to speak at 8 p.m., he didn’t emerge until around 9:30 p.m., and then he said, “I’ve gotta like Tim Sheehy a lot to be here,” mentioning the GOP candidate for Senate who spoke before him. Trump went on to complain that it takes at least “two hours” to get anywhere in Montana.
Throughout the speech, Trump seemed to be spitballing accusations against Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and even tried to accuse her campaign of colluding with the media to advance the narrative that he and his running-mate J.D. Vance are “weird.”
“Then [Harris’ running-mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz] said, ‘You know, I think J.D. Vance is weird.’ You know, it’s a word that they use. I think he calls me that, too. No, we’re not weird. We’re very solid people. We want to have strong borders, we want to have good elections, we want to have low interest rates, we want to be able to buy a house, we want great education, we want strong borders. I think we’re very — actually, I think we’re the opposite of weird.”
Trump continued, launching into his conspiracy theory: “They’re weird! You know what they do? They work with the press on coming up with the sound byte… and every station that night — all of them, CBS, ABC, NBC — they all said, ‘Oh, they were called weird, weird.’ It’s just unbelievable, you know it’s not a word that’s used very much in politics, you know, it’s a terrible thing that they can do this. It’s just a sound byte. No, J.D. Vance is a great patriot and is a United States Marine and he’s a real Marine, and he’s a brilliant guy.”
Trump also ripped the media, saying, “They’re rigged. They’re fake news.”
“They’re so nasty,” he added. “They’re the nastiest people, I think, on Earth.”
In addition to accusing his opponents and the press of plotting against him, Trump intentionally mispronounced Kamala multiple times and claimed “nobody has any idea” what Harris’ last name is. He attacked her for allegedly wanting “windmills all over the place.” He accused her of allowing undocumented immigrants into the country, even though Harris never occupied the role of “border czar” as Trump and Republicans are trying to claim. He called her “Crazy Kamala” and a “bumbling lunatic.” He claimed she “wants to take your guns away” and wants to “defund the police,” despite Harris making no such statements. “She has refused to do a single interview,” he said. “You know why? Cause she’s dumb.”
Trump also said he had larger audiences at his rallies than Harris and Walz, continuing his habit of lying about crowd size. As Rolling Stone reported this week, Trump has been privately panicking, “unhappy” with the enthusiastic crowds Harris seems to be drawing. During his press conference on Thursday, Trump claimed his Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally speech (which preceded the Capitol attack) had more attendees than Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” address, despite that being provably false.
“In NJ, I had 107,000 people,” Trump told the crowd on Friday. “The press never even talked about it. They don’t talk about it. I went to South Carolina. They don’t talk about it. I had 80,000 people.” Those numbers are huge exaggerations.
In between his attacks on Harris and the media, Trump frequently mentioned President Joe Biden — who is no longer in the race. He also launched fatphobic attacks against Sen. Jon Tester, saying the senator has “got the biggest stomach I have ever seen.”
Trump brought Rep. Ronny Jackson, who led the White House Medical Unit during his administration, to the stage where Jackson claimed “swamp hippopotamus” Tester was behind reports that Jackson was “recklessly prescribing narcotics.”
“He labeled me on TV as the candyman. He said I was recklessly prescribing narcotics,” Jackson said. “I can count on this hand right here how many times I prescribed narcotics at the White House in 14 years. He put that out there. He said that I got drunk and wrecked a government vehicle… He knew it did not happen, and it has been proven it did not happen. He did not care. He was going to destroy me to better his career, and he passed that information to these morons in the back, the mainstream media, who were willing to carry this.”
Rolling Stone reported in March of this year that Trump’s White House Medical Unit under Jackson was “like the Wild West” for prescription medications, including Xanax and speed. A 2018 Senate report found that Jackson not only irresponsibly prescribed meds while keeping poor records, he also drunkenly crashed a government car and fostered a toxic work environment.
The White House at the time said that after a thorough review of Jackson’s vehicle records, they found three minor incidents but no proof of a wreck. Last year, police body camera footage emerged showing Jackson calling a Texas state trooper a “fucking full-on dick” after Jackson refused to stand aside during a medical emergency. The officer arrested Jackson, who threatened to “call the governor.”
While Trump’s speech seemed to go over well with the crowd, over on Truth Social, things were looking more bleak. As reporter Zachary Petrizzo noted, trending hashtags on Trump’s own social media platform called for the firing of both Trump’s campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, and advisor Susie Wiles.
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”