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Former President Donald Trump accused Vice President Kamala Harris and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, of running on a “fake record” during 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 advertised but wasted little time going after his 2024 opponent.
“So when you’re commander in chief, you don’t go to the run and hide away from the press,” the former president, 78, said, seemingly alluding to Harris’ refusal to give media interviews or hold a press conference since replacing President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
“You know, they run and they wanna go on a record that’s a fake record. They have a fake record, both of them,” he continued, in an apparent reference to Harris and Walz.
Walz, 60, has been criticized by Republicans and veterans for embellishing his military service.
The Minnesota governor has falsely claimed to have carried weapons “in war” when he was 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.
“How ’bout the new guy? How do you like him?” Trump asked the crowd, which responded with boos.
“If you can’t do a press conference you cannot be president,” the former president later said, in another swipe at Harris.
He later called the vice president, 59, “dumb” and argued that President Biden, 81, is “smarter than she is but the Democrats didn’t have the courage to force her off” the ticket.
The 45th president’s visit to Big Sky Country, which included attending a fundraiser before the rally, was largely to boost Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy in his tight race against incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester.
Democrats currently have a 51-49 edge over Republicans in the upper chamber, and Montana’s seat would be a massive pickup for the GOP in November.
Trump slammed Tester, calling him a “radical,” “terrible” and noted that the Montana Democrat has “the biggest stomach I have ever seen.”
Tester is the only Democratic member of Montana’s congressional delegation. The state also has a Republican governor and both chambers of the statehouse are GOP-controlled.
The incumbent’s three previous electoral victories have been by narrow margins.
In 2006, Tester was elected to the Senate by a 0.9 percentage point margin. He did better in 2012, winning re-election by 3.7 percentage points, before falling back a bit in 2018, when he emerged victorious by only 3.5 percentage points.
Trump won the state by double digits in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
A Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey released Thursday showed Sheehy with a 2-point lead over Tester, 48% to 46%.
Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL, addressed the crowd before Trump and noted that he was driven to run for office after Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“I was on my phone trying to get American citizens, allies, interpreters, people that fought alongside us to fight the terrorists [out of the country],” he said. “Joe Biden abandoned them in Afghanistan. He left them behind and he left billions of dollars of equipment.”
“In the wake of that I got involved in politics. I said, ‘Enough is enough. I’m sick of this bulls–t. We gotta save this country.’”
