Watch: Old Man Trump Keeps Short-Circuiting During Rally

In a painful twist for his campaign, Donald Trump now appears to be the belligerent old-man candidate that he had made President Joe Biden out to be.

During a packed rally in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, the Republican presidential nominee had several memorable verbal gaffes, including failing to pronounce simple words correctly and at one point completely glitching out after saying Vice President Kamala Harris’s name.

“Together we will stop Kamala Harris’s nation-wreckting—uh, I’ll tell you what, when you see what she’s done to our nation, she’s wrecking our nation,” Trump said. “The radicalism will take back our country from the worst administration in American history.”

At another point, Trump quoted Harris as saying “Let the violent marbs keep going,” claiming that she wanted to fund “the place” before correcting himself as meaning to say “the police.”

“She will not stop, she said she was endorsing defund the place, and, the police, and she said violent marbs, let the violent mobs keep going,” Trump said.

In reality, and outside of Trump’s twisted memory, Harris told The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in 2020 that the Black Lives Matter protests were “not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not.”

Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly boasted about having aced a cognitive exam and has since argued they should be mandatory for all officials running for higher office.

In the years since he “aced” the exam, Trump has invariably tweaked the questions he allegedly received on the test, at times boasting that he had correctly recited five words and performed basic multiplication while at other times insisting that he passed thanks to correctly identifying a whale. That’s despite the fact that the test’s authors claim that none of the three versions in circulation actually have a whale in them.

Donald Trump’s own right-wing social media venture, Truth Social, seemingly turned against him as users got #TrumpIsACoward to trend over the weekend.  

The derisive hashtag made rounds on X (formerly Twitter) before it started trending on Truth Social Sunday, Raw Story reported, after Trump said he’d finally agreed to debate Vice President Kamala Harris—only, it wasn’t the September 10 debate hosted by ABC News that the two candidates had previously agreed to at all. 

Rather, Trump suggested a debate on September 4, hosted by Fox News and moderated by hosts Brett Baier and Martha MacCallum. 

While the conservative media company originally said it was “open to discussion” on the terms, in his post, Trump offered another demand: an arena packed with onlookers to watch him perform—a far cry from the previous debate hosted on CNN, which had no audience.

Trump cited ongoing litigation against ABC News and host George Stephanopolous as his new reason for bailing on ABC News’s debate. 

For weeks, Trump has offered different excuses as to why he can’t debate Harris on the same terms he’d agreed to debate Biden.

On Friday, he argued he didn’t need to debate Harris because he was already leading in the polls—a line that turned out not to be true. A week earlier, he’d had a completely different excuse. His team claimed he couldn’t debate a Democratic candidate who wasn’t officially nominated, or even endorsed by former President Barack Obama. Within hours, Harris had secured Obama’s endorsement. 

Since Harris joined the fray as the presumptive Democratic nominee, it seems more than a few of Trump’s fans have begun questioning his judgment and defecting to greener pastures (writing in Ron Paul).

Michael Tyler, the communications director for Harris’s campaign, responded to Trump’s challenge in a statement Saturday to NBC News. 

“Donald Trump is running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to and running straight to Fox News to bail him out. He needs to stop playing games and show up to the debate he already committed to on Sept 10,” Tyler said.

“The Vice President will be there one way or the other to take the opportunity to speak to a prime time national audience. We’re happy to discuss further debates after the one both campaigns have already agreed to. Mr. Anytime, anywhere, anyplace should have no problem with that unless he’s too scared to show up on the 10th.”

Who would have thought that one of Donald Trump’s biggest slogans would end up biting him in the ass.

Apparently not his campaign team, who opted to stamp “You’re Fired” all over a rally’s official signage in an ironic turn of events for the former reality TV star. The signs used at Trump’s downtown Atlanta rally on Saturday read, in their entirety, “Lyin’ Kamala, You’re Fired!”—but the choice to print the first part of the message in a much smaller font failed to translate well over TV screens.

Instead, millions of Americans witnessed the Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees speak in front of hundreds of fans wearing shirts and waving signs that appeared to call for their exit.

Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, spent the rally fearmongering on crime and immigration—including claiming that the “suburbs will be overrun with violent crime and savage foreign gangs” if they don’t win in November—while repeatedly attempting to chip away at Vice President Kamala Harris’s momentum. But still failing to craft an actual campaign against the sudden Democratic presidential nominee, Trump and Vance instead lobbed a flurry of half-baked, kindergarten-grade insults at her.

“She happens to be a really low-IQ individual. We don’t need a low-IQ individual,” Trump said of Harris on Saturday. “She’s Bernie Sanders but not as smart.”

In another portion of the rally, Trump lied that Harris wants “people to stop eating red meat” and wants to “get rid of your cows. No more cows.” He also claimed that she doesn’t want “anyone to say Merry Christmas.”

And, in a shocking side point, Trump chose to congratulate his Russian ally, President Vladimir Putin—not President Joe Biden or any of the U.S. diplomats or allies—on the recent prisoner exchange that brought Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich back after a year-long detention, as well as two other American citizens.

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is pushing two simultaneous narratives about Vice President Kamala Harris that, if they actually happened to be true, would just cancel each other out.

Harris and President Joe Biden joined families of three Americans who had been imprisoned in Russia at Joint Base Andrew in Maryland late Thursday night. Biden had helped to facilitate the release of the former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, and Russian American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva.

Despite the remarkable homecoming, MAGA used the occasion to push its own conspiracy theories about Biden and Harris. RNC Research, an account on X run by Trump’s campaign, posted a video of Biden and Harris on the tarmac.

“Kamala watches Biden shuffle aimlessly across the tarmac and nearly trip up the stairs of the plane (from which the passengers had long disembarked),” the account wrote. “This is the obvious decline Kamala covered up in her thirst for power—the scandal of the century.”

There’s a lot of problems with this post, so let’s go through them one by one. The so-called “decline” the post refers to was Biden boarding the plane to thank the pilots, not wandering into an empty plane with Harris left dumbfounded on the tarmac.

In one sentence, Trump’s campaign suggested both that Harris covered up Biden’s aging to keep him in office and simultaneously hoped that she would be given the reins. In terms of fictionalized evil schemes, one can’t both plot to keep the leader in power and also plot to oust him. Complicity or coup? MAGA Republicans need to pick one bedtime story or the other, but there just isn’t enough time for both.

This post is one small window into the Trump campaign’s scrambled efforts to shift their rhetoric around Harris, whom they are now forced to blame for everything they once tried to pin on Biden. Thursday’s prisoner swap presented a particularly sore spot for Trump, who seemed pretty miffed he wasn’t in on the complex negotiations—but lashing out like this is particularly pathetic.

Republican attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris are becoming too much for some of Donald Trump’s inner circle.

Peter Navarro, an economist who worked in the Trump White House, was guest-hosting Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast Friday, since the other former Trump adviser is serving a prison sentence for contempt of Congress. Navarro began panicking over Republicans making personal attacks against Harris’s personal life or the way she laughs, telling them to “shut up.” 

“Do we get women when we call Kamala a slut or make fun of her cackle, Ted Cruz?” Navarro asked, picking a fight with the Texas senator. “We do not. Shut up. That gets us nowhere!”

“Women, when they hear that crap, are resentful, particularly of old white men pulling that crap. Shut up,” Navarro, who is himself an old white man who served a four-month sentence in prison for contempt of Congress, added.

Navarro didn’t mention Trump by name, but Trump has been calling Harris “laughing Kamala” and alluding to her personal life in different smears. His mention of “old white men” may also be taking into account Trump’s racial attacks, particularly on Wednesday when the former president spoke at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. While some Republicans have disapproved of those comments, others have defended Trump.

The more Republicans make these attacks, the more it makes them look bad and strengthens Democrats’ effective attacks on GOP weirdness. Even an important figure in the world of MAGA like Navarro can see this backfiring. Still, he didn’t mention Trump by name, and the GOP will continue to follow the lead of the former president and convicted felon. Will Trump take the hint, or put the GOP in a deep hole as November approaches?