Charlotte, North Carolina: Donald Trump engaged in a bizarre act with his microphone stand amid technical difficulties at a rally in Wisconsin, raising further doubts about the Republican nominee’s suitability to return to the US presidency.
The act, which some have likened to simulating fellatio on the mic, came as a “pissed off” Trump fumed over sound issues at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee and asked the crowd if they wanted to see him “knock the hell out of people backstage”.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in Milwaukee on Friday.Credit: AP
“I get so angry. I’m up here seething. I’m working my ass off with this stupid mic,” he said. “I’m blowing out my left arm, now I’m gonna blow out my right arm, and I’m blowing out my damn throat too because of these stupid people.”
An assistant provided a new microphone which appeared to improve the situation, but Trump then complained the mic stand had initially been “way too low”. He jerked it up and down with his hand, and then bobbed his head up and down near it, with his mouth open, as the crowd shrieked.
CNN commentator Ana Navarro, who is campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris, said on X that the act was “not normal” and showed Trump was “disgusting, unhinged and unfit to represent the United States”.
It is not the first time Trump has had an outburst over technical difficulties on the campaign trail; weeks ago in Detroit he threatened not to pay the contractors after a microphone problem.
He referenced that incident in Milwaukee on Friday night. “Then they write a story, ‘Trump doesn’t pay his bills, he’s a bad guy’,” Trump said. “That pisses me off. They don’t get it.”
The development comes as the Democrats highlight Trump’s increasingly dramatic rhetoric in the closing days of the campaign, including his suggestion that former Republican congresswomen Liz Cheney, a Trump opponent, should be put on a battlefield with guns pointed at her face.
“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK, let’s see how she feels about it,” he said during an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“You know when the guns are trained on her face – you know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy’.”
Trump during the campaign event at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Credit: Bloomberg
Harris said the violent rhetoric should disqualify Trump from the presidency. “His enemies list has grown longer, his rhetoric has grown more extreme, and he is even less focused than before on the needs, and the concerns, and the challenges facing the American people,” she said.
The Democratic attorney-general of Arizona, where Trump made the remarks, has also opened an investigation into whether the former president violated state law.
Both leaders were scheduled to visit the critical state of North Carolina on Saturday, local time, with Trump to hold rallies in Gastonia and Greensboro, and Harris to speak in Charlotte. It is effectively a must-hold state for Trump; the only one of the seven battlegrounds he carried, narrowly, against Joe Biden in 2020.
