24 hours of Trump: QAnon tributes, crude attacks and hawking pieces of his suit
24 hours of Trump: QAnon tributes, crude attacks and hawking pieces of his suit
With fewer than 70 days until the election, Trump is zigging and zagging with an arsenal of unfocused broadsides and peripheral pursuits.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at the Huntington Place convention center in Detroit on Monday. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)
By Hannah Knowles
August 29, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
Donald Trump amplified a vulgar joke about Vice President Kamala Harris performing a sex act. He falsely accused her of a staging a coup to secure the Democratic nomination and faulted her without evidence for a security lapse that enabled a rogue gunman to try to assassinate him. He shared a manipulated online image of Bill Gates in an orange jumpsuit and a call for Barack Obama to face a military tribunal. He promoted explicit tributes to the QAnon conspiracy theory. He hawked digital trading cards in an online infomercial along with pieces of his debate night suit. (People are calling it the knockout suit.) His campaign feuded publicly with Arlington National Cemetery over their visit.
And that was just in the span of 24 hours.
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Trump spent Wednesday morning venting on Truth Social, his social media site. He let loose a flurry of reposts just after 8 a.m. There was an image of Biden, Harris, Hillary Clinton, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, former White House medical adviser Anthony S. Fauci and others in prison uniforms. There was a call to jail members of the congressional committee that investigated Trumps supporters over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol after Trumps election loss. Another repost used a QAnon slogan: WWG1WGA! RETRUTH IF YOU AGREE.
Just after noon, Trump began to claim without evidence that Harris was exaggerating her online footprint. ITS ALL FAKE, he wrote. Soon he turned to resharing a video of himself promoting digital trading cards for $99 a piece: Buy enough, he said, and you could get a physical card with bits of Trumps outfit from the June debate that helped push Biden out of the race.
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By Hannah Knowles
Hannah Knowles is a national politics reporter covering campaigns at The Washington Post. She previously reported for The Post's general assignment desk. Twitter