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Donald Trump ranted for five minutes straight after Tim Walz criticized the Republican nominee during his DNC speech.
Walz accepted the vice presidential nomination on the third night of the DNC and gave a powerful speech, in which he mentioned Trump’s ties to Project 2025 — claims that set off Trump into a lengthy, rage-filled ramble on Fox & Friends hours later.
One of the show’s hosts asked Trump about the “many different lies” that Walz and the Democrats were spreading at the convention in Chicago. The former president was asked to react to Walz’s claims that Trump and his running mate JD Vance were tied to the Project 2025 “playbook.”
The Minnesota Governor told the crowd on Wednesday: “Their Project 2025 will make things much, much harder for people who are just trying to live their lives. They spent 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,” Walz continued.
Last month, Trump posted on Truth Social that he knew “nothing about” the right-wing blueprint for a second Trump administration — that would expand the president’s executive authority and replace civil servants with Trump loyalists. However, flying in the face of Trump’s denial, Vance recently praised the leader of Project 2025 in a foreword for the leader’s upcoming book.
In response to Walz’s remarks, Trump spoke for five minutes straight. He repeatedly called Walz a “total lightweight,” alleged that he wasn’t a real coach but a “semi coach,” and labeled Walz’s claims about Project 2025 “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,” the former president said.
Seemingly not taking a breath between sentences, Trump then equated the claims about Project 2025 to Charlottesville, where neo-Nazis and white supremacists held a rally after a Robert E Lee statue was taken down. At the time Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.” On Fox & Friends, the former president said: “Just like Charlottesville, totally discredited.”
From there, he appeared to lose the plot.
Trump then talked about Biden supposedly being ousted from his 2024 campaign by a “coup” within his own party, and then ultimately pivoted to bashing Kamala Harris.
Trump then launched into a series of non sequiturs.
He started describing the vice president as a “radical left lunatic,” shifted gears to his usual claims about her home state of California being crime ridden, and then, somehow, turned to his “love” of the military.
“If she became president, if this country would turn out to be a big version of San Francisco or a big version of California itself. So these guys, they talk about that, they talk about all different things that they know are totally discredited,” Trump said.
Without pausing, he continued: “They have a thing with soldiers where I’m looking over the graves of soldiers and saying, horrible thing about dead soldiers from World War I. It was totally made up.”
The Republican nominee seemed to be referring to his now-infamous reported comment from 2018 when he supposedly called soldiers buried at a French cemetery “suckers and losers.”
“There’s nobody that loves the military more than me. Nobody did more for the military. I rebuilt the military,” Trump continued. Host Brian Kilmeade interrupted momentarily before Trump rambled on.
Later, unprompted, he falsely claimed that the Democrats posted “fraudulent job numbers.”
Trump said: “They defrauded the people of our country with with the job numbers. You saw that 818,000 fake jobs they put in the rolls….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.”
