Trump Spends Entire Rally Speech Just Making Weird Noises

President Donald Trump went post-verbal Wednesday at his rally in South Carolina.

After holding 20 campaign rallies in the span of just two months, the evidently exhausted 80-year-old president has started to insert wild sound effects into his already incoherent rants.

At one point, Trump appeared to short-circuit in the middle of a sentence. Instead of saying former North Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s name, the president produced a gagging sound.

“I’d say 90 percent of the reason I took the governor—EUHH,” Trump said. “I took the governor, I put her over at the United Nations, because I wanted this guy to be, I wanted the guy to become governor.”

Trump has repeatedly misspelled or misstated Haley’s name. Recently, Trump has appeared to forget the names of candidates he’s shown up to support.

Later, Trump described the unlawful military strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats using one of his favorite sound effects. “We brought the flow of deadly drugs coming in by ocean and sea down by 97—pew, pew, pew. Ninety-seven,” he said. Trump has been repeating this number for months, but the Pentagon’s own statements don’t support this claim.

It then appeared that Trump has given up on pretending that the flow of energy through the Strait of Hormuz has been restored. He’s also given up on trying to say it.

“Oh, and when Iran ends. POW,” Trump said, miming a downward flow. “The oil,” he clarified.

Trump’s nearly eight-month “six-week war” against Iran has caused a sustained spike in energy prices, creating a quagmire for Republicans in the coming midterm elections. The president’s pathetic deal to lift sanctions on Russian oil hasn’t helped. Trump continues to promise that an end is near, but indirect negotiations are still ongoing.

It’s hard not to view this latest rally as one humiliating moment after another. Speaking in front of thousands of people, Trump ranted about wanting to change the name of the Atlantic Ocean to “Trump Ocean,” insisted that he should’ve won the Pulitzer Prize for writing (after confusing it for his much-coveted Nobel Peace Prize), cheered on a rallygoer who assaulted a heckler, and leered at Senator Tim Scott, of all people.

JD Vance was ghosted by practically every player on the Cincinnati Bengals football team during what he apparently believed would be a spontaneous meet and greet Wednesday evening.

The vice president waited outside the locker room. Just about every team member looked at Vance and decided not to interact with him—save for tight end Drew Sample, who gave Vance’s son a fist bump. Sample then gave Vance a handshake.

The entire situation—and its terrible optics—echoed a similar locker room visit by FBI Director Kash Patel, who unexpectedly appeared in videos with the U.S. men’s hockey team after their Olympic gold medal win earlier this year.

At the time, Patel was caught on tape chugging beers inside the locker room in Milan, spurring nationwide backlash as the American public questioned if the conspiracy podcaster turned intelligence chief had utilized taxpayer funds for the excursion. But at least Patel made it inside.

Despite occupying the number two office in America, Vance quietly waited for attention in the Bengals’ hallway. When it became clear that a meet and greet wasn’t going to happen, Vance wandered off with his entourage.

It was not immediately clear why the team snubbed Vance, but either way, the vice president should have bigger things on his plate. Earlier Wednesday, Vance sparked statewide backlash across Ohio for defending a disturbing advertisement by Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that featured the estranged mother of Ramaswamy’s opponent, Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton.

The advert had Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, claim that “Amy has a serious problem.” Acton has not spoken to her mother since she was 12 years old, ABC News reported. Arthur abandoned her two children to skip town with her husband, Acton’s stepfather, who was indicted for sexually abusing the Democratic candidate as a young girl.

“Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar,” Vance said on Wednesday.

President Trump celebrated violence at his rally in South Carolina Thursday night.

At least nine protesters interrupted his speech at Clemson University, according to a pool report. In one instance, a heckler was punched by a Trump supporter in the crowd, and the president loved it.

“Wow. Man, I love that. I watched that,” Trump said. “That was incredible. Wow. That was, that was unbelievable. Is everybody OK? Who’s the guy that threw that punch?

“You know, you reminded me of Evander, the real deal, Holyfield,” Trump added, referring to the champion boxer in attendance.

“You gotta give them credit. It takes courage to do that at a Trump rally. He got whacked.”

In another instance, a MAGA fan followed a protester as security escorted him out, and hit him on the head.

Trump has a history of celebrating violence in his rallies going back to the start of his political career. In February 2016, Trump wished aloud at a rally in Las Vegas that he would have liked to punch a protester in the face. The next month, he told a rally crowd in Iowa, “So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em, would you? I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.”

As the president’s dwindling popularity keeps setting records, more and more people are showing up to his pre-midterm election rallies to heckle and protest him. The economy continues to grow worse thanks to his failed economic policies and disastrous war in Iran, increasing dissatisfaction even in areas that voted for him by wide margins.

However, Trump still retains a core group of die-hard supporters, who are perfectly willing to engage in violence to demonstrate their loyalty, whether it’s storming the Capitol building or beating up protesters. To Trump, however, nothing can go too far.

Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott publicized the endorsements of 11 Democratic sheriffs. Three of them denied ever endorsing him.

Zapata County Sheriff Ramon Montes, Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez, and Webb County Sheriff Marin Cuellar all publicly announced that they were not endorsing Abbot after he posted them on his endorsement list on Monday. While Cuellar has been removed from the list, Montes and Martinez are still on it.

“Please remove my name from this for the Governor Abbott. This is Sheriff Martin Cuellar. The governor endorsed Tano my brother’s opponent,” Cuellar wrote in a text screenshot he posted on Facebook. Cuellar is the brother of Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar, who is currently running for Texas’s 28th House district.

“I want to make it unequivocally clear that I have not issued a political endorsement of Governor Greg Abbott, and I did not authorize anyone to use my name as an endorsement,” Martinez wrote in his own official statement. “I made it clear to the Sheriff who submitted the endorsement that I could not endorse Governor Abbott. I also made it clear that no one from the Governor’s office ever contacted me regarding an endorsement, and that I do not need anyone speaking on my behalf.”

Sheriff Montes’s office told Border Report that he “is not endorsing anyone at this time.”

Recent polling has Abbott sitting just three points ahead of his Democratic challenger, former state Representative Gina Hinosoja.

Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore L. Louise Lucas, the Democratic leader behind the state’s redistricting effort, was arrested Thursday in connection with an alleged bribery and racketeering scheme.

In a 45-page indictment filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, Lucas and six co-defendants were charged with conspiring to distribute and possess marijuana, conspiring to launder money, laundering money, and committing bribery by distributing large quantities of illegal marijuana under the auspices of her legal medical cannabis business.

Lucas, an 82-year-old great-grandmother, has served in the Virginia Senate since 1992. She faces five of the eight charges included in the indictment. These charges arrive five months after the FBI raided Lucas’s office in Portsmouth, Virginia, and the neighboring cannabis dispensary she co-owns.

Speaking at a press conference, FBI Director Kash Patel claimed that Lucas had accumulated nearly $5 million in ill-gotten gains over the past five years.

Lucas has been a frequent critic of Republicans and President Donald Trump, and is an ally to Virginia’s Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger. The state senator was a central figure in mounting her party’s redistricting efforts earlier this year, which were ultimately blocked by the Virginia Supreme Court.

Also listed in the indictment were Lucas’s daughters Theresa Lucas-Lamb and Lisa Lucas-Burke, who is currently running for Portsmouth City Council. The DOJ manual prohibits federal prosecutors from timing any action for the purpose of undermining a candidate in an upcoming election.

But speaking at the press conference, Attorney General Todd Blanche insisted that the government’s actions were proper and “consistent with past practices.” When asked whether the investigation was political payback, Blanche said: “We don’t do political paybacks,” and claimed the probe had begun years before Trump reentered office. The  attorney general couldn’t offer a good explanation, however, for why he and the FBI director had bothered to give an official press conference for charges related to a declassified drug.

The indictment contains wiretap transcripts illustrating Lucas’s involvement in an alleged illegal moneymaking scheme. In a phone call in February 2026, Lucas discussed the language surrounding the state’s pending recreational marijuana legislation with an unindicted co-conspirator, according to the charging document. Lucas spoke about the possibility of the co-conspirator receiving a license, and sharing the proceeds with her because “this is our last chance at generational wealth.”

“I’ve got too old to not be greedy,” Lucas said, according to the indictment.

In another phone call a month later, Lucas said she hoped that the cannabis legislation would pass in order to make what she’d done legal, because “when I did it, it was obviously illegal.”

In a statement, Lucas indicated she intended to fight the allegations in the indictment.

“Today, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the full weight of the federal government have been wielded against an 82-year-old great grandmother,” she wrote.

“I grew up under Jim Crow. I’ve seen what happens when people in power try to silence those who stand up to them. I spent my life fighting back, and I’m not stopping now. I’m not new to this. I’m true to this,” she wrote. “I will not be intimidated. I will not be bullied. And I will not back down.”

This story has been updated.