Donald Trump went to Michigan and Wisconsin on his day off from court Wednesday to rally his supporters and complain about his legal troubles. His incoherent speech, along with inflammatory claims about abortion and pro-Palestinian student demonstrations, gained prominence.
Mispronouncing words at a rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Trump regarding Biden’s “fake infrastrucker, ershure for” before settling on “an infrastructure package.” Minutes later, the 77-year-old began complaining about Master Lock, again falling into incoherence.
The speech was just another example of his public slip-ups, which have led to speculation about his mental fitness. On Tuesday night he seemed scramble your words to an indecipherable point while speaking to Fox News about pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus.
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 didn’t have inflation. Everything was so good,” Trump told a crowd in Freeland, Michigan.
Mortgage rates and inflation registered lower levels, but most likely due to historic job losses and a lack of consumer confidence. In January 2021, when, according to Trump, “everything was so good”, unemployment was double its current level and 95,000 Americans lost their lives due to COVID-19.
Trump began peddling false election conspiracies, including that he won the election, after avoiding questions in an interview with Time earlier this week about whether he would resort to political violence if he lost.
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“They said if I got the 63 million I got the first time, which we won, there was no way I could lose. I got millions and millions more votes than that, and they eliminated us,” Trump said. “We will not allow this nonsense to happen again.”
The former president, who appointed three Supreme Court justices responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade, addressed the deeply unpopular decision.
“Democrats, Republicans, everyone wanted to take abortion out of the federal government. Everyone wanted that,” he said, before thanking conservative judges “for wisdom and courage” to destroy abortion protections.
Trump, who said “people are absolutely thrilled” about abortion rights being left up 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 on Tuesday night, calling the operations “a beautiful thing to watch.”
“New York was under siege last night,” he said of the student protesters. “To every college president, I say remove the camps immediately. Defeat the radicals and take back our campuses for all normal students.”
The defendant in a hush-hush New York criminal trial took the podium as an opportunity to criticize the proceedings in his criminal trial, as well as previous trials in a defamation case won by E. Jean Carroll.
“Every single one of these false cases is bullshit, every single one of them,” Trump told the crowd, which supposedly remained silent as he talked about his legal troubles. According to Trump, “major legal experts,” including Sean Hannity and Mark Lenin, believed there was no case.
“I have a dishonest judge, he is a totally conflicted judge. AND [the jury] it’s in about 95% of a Democratic area,” Trump said about Judge Merchanbeing careful not to mention witnesses to the case.
He went on to criticize the $91 million judgment incurred against him for repeatedly defaming Carroll.
“They said I defamed her. Because I said her story is not true, I defamed her,” he said. “We hope the appeals process works because if it doesn’t, we simply 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 he may have to seek prison time.
