President Donald Trump spoke in front of a group of workers at a tank factory in Lima, OH, on Wednesday, delivering a rambling, incoherent, and extremely aggrieved speech both about how great he is and how bad John McCain was, despite the fact that McCain has been dead for nearly seven months now.
Flanked onstage by a series of tanks painted in jungle camouflage that rendered them starkly visible against an American flag backdrop, Trump began his remarks by insisting that “a lot of people are asking me, because they love me” to clarify his ongoing feud with the deceased Arizona senator, who the president has spent the past several days bashing.
“I have to be honest,” Trump said, seemingly without the aide of a teleprompter. “I never liked him.”
Trump then went on to blame McCain for turning over the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele to the FBI, rather than to the president himself. “That’s not the nicest thing to do,” Trump insisted.
Campaign grievances over, Trump moved on to (very slightly) more current events—McCain’s infamous “thumbs down” vote against the Republican’s skinny repeal attempt to defund President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
“We said, ‘What the hell happened?’” Trump whined.
And then the president got to the meat of his complaint: The fact that John McCain—who, again, is dead—never thanked him for the very nice funeral Trump claimed he’d given him.
“I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president I had to approve,” Trump said. “I don’t care about this. I didn’t get a thank you. That’s OK. We sent him on the way, but I wasn’t a fan of John McCain.”
How dare the ghost of John McCain—a man Trump has spent years disparaging—not manifest itself in the Lincoln Bedroom to offer the president his personal thanks from beyond the grave for approving his funeral.
Trump, apparently exhausted from the effort of feuding with a dead man, then returned to his teleprompter, and rambled on about how much better American tanks are than Chinese and Russian models. At one point, he went through unemployment numbers by race, one race at a time.
Trump’s brain is bad, folks. Someone get him away from all those tanks!