Donald Trump’s Montana rally showed the trend moving toward the midterm election—the same, only worse. In a rambling, Trump-focused rant that only occasionally remembered that he was supposed to be there supporting a local candidate, Trump returned to the themes that served him so well in 2016: Racism, sexism, racism with sexism, and simple cruelty. Resigning EPA administrator Scott Pruitt did not get a mention, and neither did the whole issue of family separation—but Trump did take time out to say that he would have forced the protester who climbed the Statue of Liberty on Wednesday “to jump.”
In an extended attack on Senator Elizabeth Warren, Trump revived his “Pocahontas” insult over and over, adding to it a statement that if she ran for president, he would demand that she take a DNA test—though, as the New York Times reports, he didn’t, of course, offer to take one himself. Or to turn over his taxes. Trump offered to give a million dollars to charity “paid for by Trump” if Warren proved “she’s an Indian.” Considering Trump’s previous record of paying off his promises to charities, no one should count on that money.
In his attack on Warren, Trump also took a sideswipe at the #MeToo movement, saying that when he threw the DNA test at the senator, he would have to do so carefully, because he wouldn’t want someone from the “MeToo generation” to claim she had been injured. Trump’s addition of MeToo to the targets of his attack came on the same day that he appointed disgraced Fox News executive Bill Shine to the White House staff. Shine resigned from Fox News after complaints that he promoted a toxic work environment and ignored repeated incidents of sexual harassment or assault.
Trump also returned to his attacks on Representative Maxine Waters as a “low IQ individual,” but took it even further. Trump declared that the IQ of the African American congresswoman from California was “somewhere in the Mid-60s.”
And Trump leveled a sneer at Therese Okoumou, who climbed up the base of the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July in protest of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy and its effect on families. According to Trump, he would have made “that clown” jump, which he followed by saying that they should have just gotten some nets and waited, and which he closed with “I would have done it” in case anyone doubted he was serious about his desire to humiliate or harm.
That was far from all the hate Trump had to hand out on Thursday night. He also went after John McCain and, to the puzzlement of even the Trump-fans on hand, George H. W. Bush. And he lied about the military budget, election results and about economic numbers, before returning to two of his favorite targets for blowing his racist bullhorn—unpatriotic NFL players and the infestation of MS-13.
But he did have some good things to say … about Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un.
Comments are closed on this story.