Donald Trump launched into a bizarre fantasy after a female protester interrupted his rally.
The 80-year-old president took the stage in Gastonia, North Carolina, on Wednesday to rally support for flailing Senate candidate Michael Whatley.
He was barely five minutes into his speech and gushing about Elon Musk when boos erupted from the crowd in response to a protester.
He initially appeared to try to stay on track before turning toward the commotion and asking, “What do you have—a bad guy or a good guy over there?”
“Huh? Where is he? Who is he?” he repeated before demanding, “Show it to me. Show him. Let me see his face.”
But the protester was a woman who was restrained by police and escorted from the rally, according to a video by The Center Square D.C. bureau chief Sarah Roderick-Fitch.
“Oh—oh, it’s a ‘she.’ Hello!” Trump said after realizing the protester was a woman.
He then went down a strange rabbit hole about how the protester’s mother would punish her.
“She’s going home to mama—who’s watching right now. Her mother is watching right now on television, furious at the daughter,” he said.
The commander-in-chief imagined the punishment the woman’s mother would supposedly mete out.
“She’s going to walk, and she’s gonna get the hell… spoken out of her—I won’t say…” he said, trailing off as he chuckled.
Trump has repeatedly spun out scenarios of protesters facing their mothers’ wrath when confronted by hecklers at his rallies.
“That person’s going home to mom, gonna get scolded because mom is voting for us,” he said last month after getting heckled at a rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina—a line he was already using when he was running for president in 2016.
But Trump’s apparent belief that mothers are in his corner doesn’t line up with the results of the 2024 election, when Kamala Harris won women with children overall, 51 percent to Trump’s 47 percent, according to NBC News.
Protesters also gathered in downtown Gastonia Wednesday before Trump’s rally, according to WCNC Charlotte.
The president traveled to North Carolina as polls show Whatley trailing his Democratic opponent, former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, by as much as 11 percentage points.
The warning signs coming out of North Carolina are hardly encouraging for Republicans as the party braces for a potential November blue wave that could flip Senate seats in states including Maine, Ohio, and Texas.
