Lost Track of Trump’s Weekend Verbal Gaffes? Here’s a Full List.
Donald Trump does not seem OK. The GOP front-runner was alarmingly loose-lipped during back-to-back campaign rallies in Richmond, Virginia, and Greensboro, North Carolina, on Saturday, during which he admitted to hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, framed President Joe Biden as a national enemy, threw around the nuclear word, and confused the man currently in the White House for his old nemesis, former President Barack Obama.
“Shortly after we win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled. I know them both very well, and we will restore peace through strength. Get that war settled. It’s a bad war. And Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word. You heard that. Nuclear. He’s starting to talk nuclear weapons today,” Trump said in Virginia, drawing stunned silence from his typically uproarious crowd.
Wow the crowd goes silent as a confused Trump says: And Putin has so little respect for Obama that he's starting to throw around the nuclear word pic.twitter.com/M0oMFKUBgu
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 3, 2024
It wasn’t the first time Trump has confused the two on the campaign trail, transparently attempting to cover up the blatant memory lapses by claiming that “Obama is running the show.” But if that wasn’t enough, Trump went on to try to take credit for Veterans Choice, which was passed in 2014 under Obama.
Trump also mistook Argentina for a person, calling MAGA the “greatest movement … maybe in the history of any country, even Argentina.”
“You know, Argentina, great guy. He’s a big Trump guy. He loves Trump. I love him because he loves Trump. Anybody that loves me. I like them,” Trump said.
As Trump became increasingly flustered and overwhelmed, he couldn’t figure out how to say “Venezuela” and repeatedly short-circuited.
Trump short circuits again LOL pic.twitter.com/OqfJpZR2i8
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 2, 2024
And while in North Carolina, Trump aligned himself with the January 6 rioters, hailing them as “hostages,” while pegging himself as “a proud political dissident” and “a public enemy of a rogue regime.”
And, despite awaiting trial in relation to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, Trump condemned President Joe Biden as “the real threat to democracy.”
“Biden’s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” he said in Greensboro. “Biden and his accomplices want to collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters, and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.”
Other glitches included mistaking a poll for a legislative bill, calling the country the “United Stage” and a “nation that’s no longer respectered,” and just generally making an uncanny assortment of noises for a candidate for the most powerful office in the world: “Diiiiing, boom. This is me, [unintelligible] bing!”
Ahead of the weekend, Trump’s campaign signaled that it had no intention of reeling in the GOP front-runner’s alarming rhetoric.
“Donald Trump is Donald Trump. That’s not going to change. Our job is not to remake Donald Trump,” senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita told the Associated Press.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung added that Americans “deserve a president who will not sugarcoat what’s happening in the world.”
And Biden’s campaign appears ready to rely on that.
“Donald Trump is still Donald Trump—the same extreme, dangerous candidate voters rejected in 2020, and they’ll reject him again this November regardless of the team he has around him,” said Biden spokesman Kevin Munoz.
Trump has worked to distance himself from the issue of age, slamming Biden for similar verbal gaffes despite joining the 81-year-old as one of the oldest presidential candidates in U.S. history.
Over the last few months, Trump has repeatedly prided himself on “acing” a dementia test, insisted that immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border “don’t speak languages,” claimed that he would stop banks from “debanking” Americans, mixed up former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and his only remaining rival in the GOP race, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, and described his plan for America’s missile defense system by going, “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.… Boom. OK. Missile launch. Woosh. Boom.”
He also appeared with mysterious, unexplained red sores on his hands that political commentators couldn’t help but notice looked an awful lot like syphilis.