Former President Donald Trump accused Vice President Kamala Harris and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, of campaigning on a “false record” at a campaign rally in Montana on Friday.
Trump, whose plane was diverted to Billings earlier in the day due to mechanical problems, took the stage at Brick Breeden Fieldhouse in Bozeman an hour and a half later than scheduled but wasted no time in lashing out at his 2024 opponent.
“So when you’re commander in chief, you don’t run and hide from the press,” the former president, 78, said, apparently referring to Harris’ refusal to give media interviews or hold a news conference since replacing President Biden as the Democratic leader.
“You know, they’re running around and they want to make a record that’s a fake record. They both have a fake record,” he continued, apparently referring to Harris and Walz.
Walz, 60, has been criticized by Republicans and veterans for embellishing his military service.
The Minnesota governor falsely claimed to have carried weapons “in wartime,” when he never deployed to a battlefield during his 24 years in the National Guard. Walz retired from the National Guard in 2005 as his battalion was preparing to deploy to Iraq.
“What about the new one? Do you like it?” Trump asked the crowd, which responded with boos.
“If you can’t do a press conference, you can’t be president,” the former president later said, in a further attack on Harris.
He then called the vice president, 59, “stupid” and argued that President Biden, 81, is “smarter than her, but the Democrats didn’t have the courage to force her off” his ticket.
The 45th president’s visit to Big Sky Country, which included attending a fundraiser before the rally, was largely aimed at supporting Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy in his tight race against Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Tester.
Democrats currently have a 51-49 lead over Republicans in the upper chamber, and the Montana seat would be a massive boost for the GOP in November.
Trump blasted Tester, calling him a “radical,” “terrible” and noting that the Montana Democrat had “the biggest stomach I’ve ever seen.”
Tester is the only Democratic member of Montana’s congressional delegation. The state also has a Republican governor and both houses of the Capitol are controlled by the Republican Party.
The incumbent president’s three previous election victories were won by narrow margins.
In 2006, Tester was elected to the Senate by a margin of 0.9 percentage points. He did better in 2012, winning re-election by a margin of 3.7 percentage points, before losing some ground in 2018, when he emerged victorious by just a margin of 3.5 percentage points.
Trump won the state by double-digit margins in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
An Emerson College Polling/The Hill poll released Thursday showed Sheehy with a 2-point lead over Tester, 48 percent to 46 percent.
Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL, addressed the crowd before Trump and noted that he was inspired to run for office after Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“I was on the phone trying to get American citizens out of the country, allies, interpreters, people who fought alongside us to fight terrorists,” he said. “Joe Biden abandoned them in Afghanistan. He left them behind and he left billions of dollars of equipment behind.”
“After that, I got involved in politics. I said to myself: ‘Enough. I’ve had enough of this bullshit. We have to save this country.'”
