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.
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.