Former President Donald Trump used apparent technical issues during a Friday rally to toy with the idea of attacking people working the event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
“You’ve got to be kidding. Do you want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage?” asked the GOP presidential nominee, who called it a “pretty stupid situation” after rallygoers chanted “fix the mic” during his speech.
He later added: “I get so angry. I’m up here seething. I’m seething. I’m working my ass off with this stupid mic. I’m blowing out my left arm. Now I’m going to blow out my right arm and I’m blowing out my damn throat, too, because these stupid people.”
He went on to rant about retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, his former chief of staff, before continuing to fume over the apparent microphone issues.
Trump also complained about the low height of microphone stands at his events and showed how he would work around such issues, bobbing his head up and down in what many observers suggested was an imitation of oral sex.
Trump’s Milwaukee remarks came just one day after he suggested at an Arizona event that former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) would be less of a “radical war hawk” if she experienced guns being “trained on her face.”
Cheney — who has endorsed Trump’s 2024 rival, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris — condemned his imagined scenario, saying: “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death.”
Harris slammed Trump’s remarks about Cheney as “disqualifying,” adding that anyone “who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly disqualified and unqualified to be president.”
Trump has a history of using such rhetoric at his rallies. He suggested that a protester could “get the hell knocked out of her” at an event in California last month.
In 2016, he told supporters in Iowa to “knock the crap” out of hecklers. Trump separately told a crowd in Nevada that year that he’d like to punch a protester “in the face.”
“You know what they used to do to a guy like that in a place like this?” he said. “They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”