Trump calls Walz ‘weird’, steps up attacks on Democratic candidate

Former President Donald Trump criticized Tim Walz on Friday as “weird” and excessively liberal, using his first rally since the Minnesota governor joined the Democratic ticket to road-test a series of attacks against him.

“He’s really weird,” Trump said during a meandering speech in Montana. “If Comrade Walz and Comrade (Kamala) Harris win in November, the people cheering for him will be the pink-haired Marxists, the looters, the perverts, the flag-burners, the Hamas supporters, the drug dealers, the gun thieves and the human traffickers.”

Trump accused Ms. Walz of promoting socialism, being too liberal on immigration and transgender issues and letting “rioters and looters burn down Minneapolis” after the killing of George Floyd in 2020. He linked the vice president to his new running mate’s policies, saying: “That’s her ideology. That’s why she chose him.” He warned that Harris and Ms. Walz would turn America into a “full-blown communist country.”

And he again hit back at Walz’s characteristic characterization of the GOP.

“We’re not weird,” Trump said. “We’re the opposite of weird. They’re weird.”

Trump also continued to smear Kamala Harris, who is raising more money than he is and is surging in the polls. The former president, who often mispronounces Harris’s first name, said he doesn’t care if “I do it right” and that “nobody really knows her last name.” He called her “stupid” for not giving an interview since she became the front-runner. (Harris has said she would like to do so by the end of the month.) And he released a video showing clips of Harris from her last presidential campaign, saying she supported gun buybacks and banning fracking — positions she has since abandoned — in an attempt to paint her as “dangerously liberal.”

If she wins in November, Trump said, “we won’t have a country anymore.”

Trump’s remarks came hours after Harris and Walz attended a rally in Arizona, where the vice president addressed immigration, a major campaign issue. At that event, Harris pledged to fight for “stronger border security” and blamed Trump for the failure of a bipartisan border deal in Congress earlier this year.

“He talks a lot about border security, but he does nothing,” she said.

Trump in turn accused Harris of allowing an “invasion” on the southern border.

The former president traveled to Montana, a Republican state he won by 16 percentage points in 2020, to promote Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tim Sheehy in his bid to unseat Sen. Jon Tester, one of the chamber’s most vulnerable Democrats. It’s a pending matter for Trump, who campaigned for Tester’s last Republican challenger after the senator opposed his pick to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“He’s terrible, he’s terrible,” Trump said of Tester on Friday, later insulting his weight.

Trump was forced to take a detour en route to Bozeman, as his plane was diverted to Billings due to a mechanical problem. Trump’s plane landed safely and he continued on to Bozeman on another plane. He is also fundraising in Wyoming and Colorado while in the Rockies.