Former President Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail Friday in Montana, where he railed against vulnerable Sen. Jon Tester, briefly talked up the Democrat’s GOP challenger and then unleashed another dizzying series of attacks on the Democratic presidential ticket.
The rally in Bozeman was Trump’s first since Vice President Kamala Harris officially secured the Democratic nomination and selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate, two moves that have energized Democrats and, if only for a few days, knocked the former president out of the headlines.
Big Sky Country is expected to break overwhelmingly for Trump in November, but the Senate race is on track to be much closer – and could swing the balance of power in the chamber.
“We need the Senate,” Trump told the crowd Friday, stressing the critical nature of the contest here. “We need the Senate.”
As president in 2018, Trump stumped hard for then-state Auditor Matt Rosendale, visiting the state four times during that midterm cycle. Rosendale, now a congressman, lost to Tester by about 3 points.
Tester’s opponent this year – Republican Tim Sheehy, a retired Navy SEAL and aerospace CEO – appeared alongside Trump at the event but was hardly the honored guest. Trump has for years been at odds with Tester, the top Democrat on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, over the senator’s role in sinking the nomination of former White House doctor Ronny Jackson to run the Veterans Affairs Department.
Jackson, now a congressman from Texas, traveled to Bozeman to deliver his own indictment of Tester, who, in 2018, helped compile a report detailing a slew of allegations – including abusive behavior, loosely handling prescription drugs and being intoxicated on the job – that eventually caused Jackson to withdraw from consideration.
“He decided that it was in his political best interest and would help his (reelection campaign) if he could come out and be the guy who tore down one of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees,” an agitated Jackson told the crowd. “He tried to destroy me.”
New Democratic ticket
Trump’s visit to Montana came on the heels of a busy week for Harris, who officially selected Walz as her vice presidential pick on Tuesday before the two struck out on a campaign tour of battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona. In addition to his typical attack lines, Trump also brought audio-visual aids on this occasion, twice stopping his speech to play video mash-ups of Harris either misspeaking or embracing a liberal cause.
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has closely mirrored the Harris-Walz campaign’s schedule over the past few days, visiting many of the same states in what he said was an effort to heighten the contrast between the dueling tickets.
Trump on Friday acknowledged Vance’s difficulties during his first few weeks as the Republican vice presidential nominee. Calling his new running mate “really special,” Trump recalled telling Vance, “You got your sea legs” after taking some early shots.
The former president was less complimentary of Walz, calling him “very freakish” while previewing further lines of attack.
If Harris and Walz win the election, Trump said, “the people cheering will be the pink-haired Marxists, the looters, the perverts, the flag burners, Hamas supporters, drug dealers, gun-grabbers and human traffickers.”
That riff, and others like it, were part of a broad, though scattered, attempt to paint the Democratic ticket as too liberal.
“But I’m not talking about him, I’m talking about her,” Trump added, referring to Harris. “This is her ideology. That’s why she picked him.”
Trump made only passing reference to his campaign’s recent attacks about Walz’s military service, which have mostly been deployed by Vance, who served in the Marine Corps.
“His really is valor,” Trump said of Sheehy, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other deployments. “It’s valor for heroism award, you know. The other one talks about valor. He has a different kind of a valor. It’s the opposite.”
Vance has accused Walz of “stolen valor” for language he used in a 2018 speech advocating an assault weapons ban, which the Harris campaign has included in a video on social media. Walz at the time said he wanted to “make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.” Walz never deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq or a combat zone as part of his service.
The Bozeman rally also marked Trump’s first foray outside Florida this week. On Thursday, he held a roughly hourlong news conference with reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida during which he attempted to recapture the spotlight from his Democratic rival.
Trump used the attention to toss a familiar laundry list of attacks against Harris, Walz and Democrats more broadly. The former president repeatedly insulted Harris’ intelligence and needled her for not yet holding a news conference of her own, described Walz as a left-wing radical in disguise and, once more, insisted that Jewish voters who support Democrats “should have their heads examined.”
On Friday, Trump again attacked the vice president’s intelligence and mocked her for not doing an interview or holding a news conference since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee.
He falsely claimed that Harris is “refusing to debate” him. Harris and Trump have both agreed to a debate hosted by ABC on September 10, and Harris told reporters she would be “happy” to discuss another debate.
Trump also said Friday that he didn’t care if he mispronounced Harris’ name and claimed without elaborating that “nobody really knows her last name.”
“Kamala, sometimes referred to as Kamala, you know, she’s got about nine different ways of pronouncing the name,” Trump said. “And because the press is so dishonest, no matter how you say it, they’ll say you were wrong. You were wrong. I don’t care if I get it right. Actually, I couldn’t care less.”
New phase of campaign
The past week has thrust the 2024 campaign into a new phase, with the major-party tickets now, finally, firmly in place ahead of the election and the candidates ratcheting up their rhetoric.
Harris and Walz have used their battleground state swing this week to paint the election as a choice between a prosecutor and a convicted felon, as well as a “normal” ticket, theirs, and the “weird” pairing of Trump and Vance.
Trump’s running mate, meanwhile, used his travels to attack Harris’ record on crime, inflation and the border, while also doubling down on the former president’s false claims about her heritage, labeling her “a chameleon” who “pretends to be something different depending on which audience she’s speaking to.”
Vance also escalated his attacks on Walz, accusing the Minnesota governor of ducking service in Iraq when he left the Army National Guard in 2005 to run for Congress. Walz retired two months before his unit received alert orders to deploy to Iraq.
Those clashes mostly took a backseat on Friday night to what’s expected to be an ultra-competitive Senate race. Tester, who was first elected in 2006, is the last-remaining Democrat in nonjudicial statewide office in Montana.
Sheehy, meanwhile, has won the support of both Trump and his allies and the GOP establishment, which views the seat as key to winning a Senate majority going into 2025.
Montana Sen. Steve Daines, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the first member of his party’s leadership to back Trump’s 2024 bid, was an early Sheehy supporter and helped convince the former president to get behind him.
Speaking to reporters before the rally, Daines said that he personally encouraged Trump to visit his home state, despite it not being a presidential battleground, because he believes Montana will be the state that delivers Republicans the Senate majority come November.
“You can imagine if President Trump had to call Chuck Schumer and try to figure out how to get his nominees through,” Daines said. “So that’s why Montana becomes very important, because this becomes the 51st seat.”
The Montana contest is one of just two Senate campaigns in which a Democratic incumbent is seeking reelection in a state Trump twice carried. Sen. Sherrod Brown’s campaign in Ohio is the other. But unlike in Ohio, Montana Republicans quickly coalesced around Sheehy, avoiding a tempestuous primary.
Sensing the stakes, both parties have poured money into the contest, spending tens of millions on early advertising and booking airtime in the coming fall months, making it the second-most expensive Senate race of the cycle so far.
CNN’s David Wright contributed to this report.