While speaking at his first campaign rally since the July 13 assassination attempt on his life, former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump uncharacteristically defended the media and its coverage of the shooting at his rally last weekend. Trump told the crowd in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to stop booing the media and explained, “The fake news reported it correctly. There’s never been such unity.”
Trump said the press “covered [the shooting] fairly” and added, “They couldn’t believe what they were seeing.” While defending the media, he also took the opportunity to defend authoritarian leaders during his speech.
“They’re all smart, tough,” Trump said of authoritarian leaders. “They love their country, or they want to do well with their country, whatever it is, all ideology. But we have to have somebody that can protect us, and [Hungary’s Viktor] Orbán was right: we have to have somebody that can protect us.”
“Right now we have really low IQ people in there,” Trump added in an apparent dig at Joe Biden’s administration. “And the president in particular, he has about a 70 IQ and he’s going against 210, and that never works out, it never works out.”
The Michigan rally was also Trump’s first since J.D. Vance — like Trump, a fellow apparent admirer of Hungary’s Prime Minister Orbán — was announced as Trump’s running mate going into this week’s Republican National Convention. Vance’s performance at the rally was criticized by journalist Aaron Rupar, who tweeted, “Vance’s delivery is way too schoolteacher for a Trump rally.”
Vance praised Trump’s record as president. “He did it so successfully for four years,” Vance said, going on to emphasize the unique dynamic between Biden and Trump running against one another. “Think about this: we have never had an election where you have four years of one guy and four years of the other guy. And who could possibly reject the idea that four years of President Trump has been a hell of a lot better than four years of Joe Biden, right?”
You can watch more of the Trump-Vance rally in the video below:
