Donald Trump had one of his weirdest campaign moments yet as he updated an anti-trans rant that included a series of grunts as he imitated a woman lifting weights.
“I will tell you another thing that people can’t even believe: I will keep men out of women’s sports, OK?” the former president told a cheering audience in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Thursday.
Then, as he prepared to break out an impression of a woman struggling to lift weights at a competition, he surveyed the crowd.
“Should I do it?” he asked.
The audience cheered.
“I’m gonna do it,” he replied, and then he launched into his impression:
“Then a guy came along who happens to be a woman now, according to the laws of our country,” he said, and he mockingly imitated a transgender athlete easily lifting that same set of weights.
Trump has used similar moves and grunts to imitate female athletes in past rants against transgender people in sports, but he seemed to dial it up a few notches during his Thursday event.
There were a few other oddball moments: Trump told the crowd he had a “major announcement,” which turned out to be a declaration that he was retiring the “Crooked Hillary” nickname given to 2016 presidential rival Hillary Clinton and bestowing it on President Joe Biden.
He also unveiled a weird pronunciation of the name Lenin ― as in Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin ― which he claimed is the Russian way of saying the name.
It’s not:
That quote is not typically attributed to Lenin, regardless of pronunciation.
It’s often attributed to late Soviet ruler Josef Stalin, although there’s no contemporaneous evidence he said it ― and the earliest known example of a similar quote actually comes from a 19th century US political comic, according to Snopes.