Minnesota Governor Tim Walz usually slips a few zingers into his remarks at campaign rallies around the country.
But the Democratic nominee for vice president came to Madison, Wisconsin, on Tuesday with a particularly fiery spirit, ripping into former President Donald Trump and the right-wing billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk with a series of choice words.
Up first in the line of attack was Trump, as Walz mocked him for staging a campaign stunt at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. He quipped that the location made Trump appear “much more like Ronald McDonald than the clown that he actually is.”
“And Ron wears less makeup,” Walz added. He theorised that Trump, who has been “forgetting things lately,” may have “mixed up his weekends and thought it was Halloween already.”
“Everything about this guy is fake. Everything he does is fake,” Walz went on. “Next, he’s gonna be telling you he’s a cop and a construction worker because he dances to the Village People.”
On Sunday, Trump manned the deep fryer and served up fries to someone at the drive-thru window as a pack of photographers outside captured the moment. The restaurant had been shut down for the event, which had spiralled out of Trump’s repeated insistence that Vice President Kamala Harris had lied about working at McDonald’s during a summer home from college. (There is no evidence to suggest she lied.)
“Look, there’s something not just nuts, but cruel, about a billionaire using people’s livelihoods as a political prop,” Walz said of Trump. “His agenda lets big corporations not pay people for overtime and diminishes those very people he was cosplaying as.”
Walz also took aim at Trump’s reported exhaustion, saying, “I can promise you he’s not as exhausted as the American people are of him.”
He took a moment to skewer Trump’s term for the meandering, hard-to-follow responses he gives in interviews and during the off-the-cuff portions of his campaign rallies. Trump calls his rhetorical style “the weave,” claiming that he always ends up back on track.
“Donald, come on,” Walz joked. “We know there’s only one weave that you know anything about.”
He later turned to Musk, joking that the controversial tech CEO had sidelined Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance (Republican, Ohio).
Musk’s involvement in Trump’s campaign has indeed ramped up from his first appearance onstage in Butler, Pennsylvania, earlier this month; in recent days he began handing out $1 million checks to randomly selected voters at Trump’s rallies.
“Look, Elon’s on that stage, jumpin’ around, skipping like a dipshit,” Walz said, prompting cheers.
Recalling how Trump suggested he would nominate Musk to a top-tier position in his administration, Walz pointed out that could put Musk in charge of policies that affect his various companies.
“So in other words, Donald Trump, in front of the eyes of the American public, is promising corruption,” Walz said. “I don’t believe he’ll keep many promises, but he’ll keep that one. I guarantee he’ll keep that one.”
Walz’s tone shifted as he praised Harris, touching on her proposals to improve Medicare, encourage small business startups and ease the process of buying a home.
But soon he turned back to Trump.
He warned that the former president has said he would use the military to, in Walz’s words, “go after people who disagree with his idiotic ideas,” and that Trump declined the chance to take back his alarming suggestion.
Walz said that Vance defended his running mate by saying Trump simply spoke “from the heart.”
“A cold, Grinchy, three-sizes-too-small heart,” Walz said.