SELF CENTERED
Just days after 11 people collapsed of heat exhaustion at an Arizona town hall, the former president kvetched about how little attention people had paid to his own well-being.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Three days after nearly a dozen people were treated for heat-related symptoms at an Arizona town hall he held in record-shattering heat, Donald Trump complained jokingly to a Las Vegas crowd at a similarly sweltering rally about how no one worries about him.
“They never mention me. I’m up here sweating like a dog,” he said. “[The] Secret Service said we have to make sure everyone is safe. I said, ‘What about me?’ We never thought of that. They don’t think about me. I’m working my ass off. I’m working hard.”
Temperatures in Vegas hovered around 100 degrees on Sunday. At least one person collapsed at the outdoor rally, prompting the people around her to bellow for medical aid and a Secret Service agent to come sprinting over, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“It’s 110 [degrees], but it doesn’t feel like it to me,” the former president, decked out in a sports jacket and red MAGA hat, had said moments earlier.
The medical incidents in Arizona resulted in the hospitalization of 11 people who had lined up in the sun for hours to see Trump speak, with local fire officials describing their treatment as precautionary. The Trump campaign scrambled to better prepare for Vegas, hiring extra medics, prepping thousands of water bottles, and setting up misting fans and cooling stations around the venue, according to the Associated Press.
The former president encouraged anyone in the crowd feeling the effects of the heat to seek help. “If anybody gets tired, you let me know,” he said. “And if anybody goes down, if you start going down, we have people. They’ll pick you up right away. They’ll throw water.”
Riffing off the cuff even more than usual, the former president returned more than once to the subject of teleprompters, which he complained were not working at the rally.
“I pay all this money to teleprompter people, and I’d say 20 percent of the time they don’t work,” he bellyached. “The thing’s waving around, they can’t tie it a little bit tighter? So we’re all in this together—just a mess!”
As has become his habit, Trump also name-checked his “J6 warriors,” praising them for bravely attacking the U.S. Capitol in his name.
“They were warriors, but they were really, more than anything else, victims of what happened,” he remarked. “The police say, ‘Go in.’ What a setup that was.”
And speaking of setups, the former president had plenty to say about his recent legal woes, whining that he’d been “indicted, indicted, and indicted again” across the country “like a ping-pong ball.” He was convicted last month of 34 charges of falsifying business records in New York, and faces further criminal proceedings in Florida, Georgia, and Washington, D.C.
“A disgrace, a disgrace,” Trump said Sunday. He singled out Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting him on federal charges of mishandling classified documents, calling him “a dumb son of a bitch.”
He also promised to roll out a policy that would exempt service workers’ tips from taxation—and later posted a screed to his Truth Social account about it.
“It was my idea that Tips should not be taxed, and only I will GET IT DONE - And do it IMMEDIATELY upon my return to the White House,” he wrote.
“Biden could never, and will never, get done what I’ve proposed - Just like he never got Student Loan Forgiveness done. With Biden, it’s ALL TALK, AND NO ACTION.”
The rally in Nevada, a key battleground state, marks his first since being found guilty. The former president launched a fundraising blitz off the back of his conviction, which he bragged about on Sunday.
“Largest fundraiser in the period of one week than anyone has ever had,” he claimed, referencing the $141 million his campaign and the Republican National Committee said they’d raised in May. A significant portion of the financial windfall was donated to him in the first 24 hours after the New York verdict, his campaign added.
It was reported earlier on Sunday that Trump was scheduled to appear virtually for a pre-sentencing interview with a probation officer on Monday. He is set to be sentenced in the hush money case on July 11.
