Donald Trump went on an absurdly long and winding tirade Thursday when asked to respond to Tim Walz’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.
During a morning appearance on Fox & Friends, Trump was asked to respond to the Democratic vice presidential nominee’s speech linking Trump to Project 2025, which has been proven time and time again.
“Their Project 2025 will make things much much harder for people who are just trying to live their lives,” Walz said. “They spend a lot of time pretending they know nothing about this. But look, I coached high school football long enough to know—and trust me on this—when somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”
When asked to respond to Walz, Trump took off on a winding rant that touched on a little bit of everything. Although it is broken up below into more digestible chunks, it should be understood as a wall of uninterrupted text.
“Well, first of all, he’s a total lightweight. And he shouldn’t be even having any access to possibly being president. The guy, he’s been a terrible governor. They’ve had nothing but problems in their state. He has no capability. They call him coach. He’s a semi-coach. You coach some football for a little while. This guy is a lightweight, and he shouldn’t have access,” Trump ranted.
“And for him to say about Project 25 is disgraceful. They know I have nothing to do with it. I had no idea what it was. A group of people got together. They drew up some conservative values, very conservative values, and in some case, perhaps they went over the line. Perhaps they didn’t. I have no idea what Project 25 is, but they use it, and they know it.”
Then began Trump’s rapid-fire word association rant, which has been painstakingly edited for brevity. The Republican nominee claimed that, like his controversial comment about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which was often touted by President Joe Biden as his reason for running, his links to Project 2025 had been “totally discredited.”
Trump lamented the so-called “coup” against Biden, who was probably sitting on a beach in “crime-ridden” California, where everything Kamala Harris “touched turned bad,” with its “terrible, terrible crime trouble, and every other form of trouble.”
“You go into Los Angeles and you can’t walk down the streets,” and “San Francisco is unlivable,” Trump said. If Harris is elected, he said, “this country would turn out to be a big version of San Francisco.” Gentle reminder, he was supposed to be responding to Walz.
Trump then complained that Democrats had wrongly claimed he called veterans “losers” and “suckers” after he had done so much for the military, and the Biden administration had abandoned “$85 billion” in equipment in Afghanistan, although it was more like $7 billion. Trump was briefly interrupted by Brian Kilmeade, who said Harris had been “the last one in the room, and she was the last one in the room when that decision was made.”
Trump then managed to speak uninterrupted for another three minutes, about Afghanistan, China, and people falling off of planes. He mentioned crime rates, the border, and a recent report that found that U.S. employers added 818,000 fewer jobs in the year ending in March than initially reported.
“They thought they were going to keep those numbers until right after the election, when they could announce a revision. But they weren’t able to do that because they had a leaker and somebody leaked the numbers. They were fraudulent job numbers, just like they have fraudulent crime numbers,” Trump said. Another gentle reminder, he was supposed to be responding to Walz.
