Trump slurs words and struggles to gain crowd enthusiasm in Midwest rallies
Donald Trump took to Michigan and Wisconsin on his day off from court, Wednesday, to rally his supporters and whine about his legal woes. His incoherent speech, along with inflammatory claims on abortion and pro-Palestinian student demonstration, took the spotlight.
Slurring his words at a Waukesha, Wisconsin rally, Trump referred to Biden’s “fake infrastrucker, ershure para,” before settling on “a package of infrastructure.” Minutes later, the 77-year-old launched into a rant about Master Lock, again slipping into incoherence.
The speech was just another instance of his public slips, which have led to speculation on his mental fitness. Tuesday night, he seemed to scramble his words to an indecipherable point while speaking to Fox News about pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations.
In a moment of cognitive function, Trump managed to spew self-aggrandizing historical inaccuracies about the state of the nation when he left office.
“When I left, [the mortgage rate] was 2.7%. We had no inflation. Everything was so good,” Trump said to a crowd in Freeland, Michigan.
Mortgage rates and inflation were at lower points, but most likely due to historic job losses and lack of consumer confidence. In January 2021, when, per Trump, “everything was so good,” unemployment was double its current figure and 95,000 Americans lost their lives to COVID-19.
Trump went on to peddle false election conspiracies, including that he won the election, after dodging questions in a Time interview earlier this week about whether he’d resort to political violence if he lost.
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"They said that if I got the 63 million that I got the first time, which we won, that there was no way I could lose. I got millions and millions of more votes than that, and they nipped us,” Trump said. “We're not letting that bulls**t happen again."
The former president, who appointed three Supreme Court justices responsible for Roe v. Wade’s overturn, addressed the deeply unpopular ruling.
“Democrats, Republicans, everybody wanted to get abortion out of the federal government. Everybody wanted that,” he said, before thanking the conservative justices “for the wisdom and the courage” to gut abortion protections.
Trump, who said that “people are absolutely thrilled” with abortion rights being left to the states, falsely accused Democrats of allowing late-term abortions at eight and nine months and “execution after birth.”
To crowds in Wisconsin, Trump applauded the New York Police Department’s crackdown on protests at Columbia University and the City College of New York late Tuesday night, calling the raids “a beautiful thing to watch.”
“New York was under siege last night,” he said of student demonstrators. "To every college president, I say remove the encampments immediately. Vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses for all of the normal students."
The defendant in a New York criminal hush money trial took the soapbox as an opportunity to lambast proceedings in his criminal trial, as well as previous judgments in a defamation case won by E. Jean Carroll.
“Every one of these fake cases is bulls**t, every single one,” Trump told the crowd, who reportedly became hushed as he ranted about his legal woes. Per Trump, “great legal experts,” including Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, believed there was no case.
“I have a crooked judge, he’s a totally conflicted judge. And [the jury] is in about a 95 percent Democrat area,” Trump said of Judge Merchan, taking care not to mention witnesses in the case.
He went on to criticize the $91 million dollar judgment incurred on him for repeatedly defaming Carroll.
“They said I defamed her. Because I said her story isn’t true, I defamed her,” he said. “Hopefully the appeal process works because, if it doesn’t, you just don’t have a country.”
Trump is due back in court Thursday morning for a hearing on further violations of his gag order, after Merchan warned that he may have to turn to jail time.
