Donald Trump’s disastrous speech on Sunday perfectly demonstrated the cognitive decline that attendees at his rallies have been witnessing for months.
The New York Times published a report Sunday analyzing Trump’s recent rally speeches, finding them longer, more rambling, and more extreme than ever before. That same day, during a rally in Juneau, Wisconsin, Trump embarked on a nearly two-hour speech filled to the brim with misinformation, random grievances, and incoherent gaffes.
Trump slurred his words as he rambled about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, calling it “probably worse than Katrina.”
“If you want someone who steals your wealth and abandons your family when the floods waters rise, those… flood… waters rise. And they were gone,” Trump ranted. “They haven’t seen anybody from the federal government yet.”
Trump has spent the last week spewing misinformation about the federal response to Hurricane Helene. He falsely claimed that Democrats were preventing aid from reaching Republican areas (something he actually once considered after the California wildfires), and lied that there had been “no helicopters, no rescue” efforts at all in North Carolina.
During his speech, Trump also gushed over Elon Musk, who, between running a pro-Trump super PAC and spreading election misinformation, has apparently provided “big doses of” Starlink to some affected by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina per Trump’s request. If “doses” seems like the wrong word to describe internet connection, that’s because it is. Even Trump admitted that he doesn’t “know what the hell” Starlink is.
Trump then made a particularly grim remark when asking if there were any people in the audience planning to vote for “Lyin’ Kamala.”
“Please raise your hand. Please raise your… actually I should say don’t raise your hand. It would be very dangerous,” Trump said, laughing. “We don’t want to see anyone get hurt. Please don’t raise your hand.”
At one point, Trump became increasingly distracted by a fly, calling it a “very aggressive sucker.”
“This one, this one in particular is very aggressive… like, I’m going to be aggressive for our country. You can probably say that,” Trump joked to uproarious applause.
Trump also whined about his canceled interview with 60 Minutes. Trump had decided not to go through with the interview, CBS announced last week. The Trump campaign has since claimed that CBS “begged” for an interview but wouldn’t agree not to fact-check the Republican nominee.
On stage, Trump insisted instead that it was because he had not received an apology for his last appearance on the show in 2020, where he had thrown a fit about how inappropriate it was to be asked “tough questions” before cutting the interview short. Trump said he’d ended the interview after he was incorrectly fact-checked about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“Ah, it’s terrible. So we’re waiting for an apology, they want to do it again,” Trump said.
“I’ll do it again, but they gotta apol—don’t you think I should make them apologize?”
In addition to repeatedly garbling his words, saying “Midworsten” and “Evan juggles” (Evangelicals), the Republican nominee made a number of outlandish lies. He attempted to take credit for the recent record highs in the stock market, claiming that “the market goes up every time I get a good poll number,” while also promising a “1929 depression” if Harris were elected (he said the exact same thing about Biden in 2020). He attempted to walk back his own remarks that voters would only need to vote one more time, and promised again to be a dictator “for one day.”
