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.
