Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday sought to gain political capital after Iran launched nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel as part of a broader proxy war in the Middle East.
Speaking for roughly an hour at a rally in battleground Wisconsin, the GOP presidential nominee attempted to place the blame for Iran’s attack on the U.S. ally squarely on the shoulders of his Democratic opponent.
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“The two incompetent people running our country — I don’t actually think they’re even running it — are leading us to the brink of WWIII and a war like no other. This is what the policies of weakness and appeasement have brought to the world,” Trump said in reference to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“You wouldn’t trust Joe or Kamala to run a lemonade stand anywhere, would you?” he added.
Under the leadership of Harris and Biden, Trump described a dystopian world “spiraling out of control” and that the planet was “close to global catastrophe.”
“We have a nonexistent president and a nonexistent vice president who should be in charge, but nobody knows what’s going on,” Trump continued.
Congressional Republicans quickly took messaging cues from Trump, who earlier in the day posted that Iran “was in total check” while he was in office. Allies on Capitol Hill reiterated their support for Israel and argued the Biden administration has enabled terrorist groups in Iran and beyond by failing to enforce sanctions and rolling back Trump-era policies to rein in Iran’s nuclear capability.
The missiles lobbed by Iran came just days after Israeli forces took out Hezbollah’s leader in Lebanon and a subsequent ground invasion by Israel, prompting warnings from Iran of retaliation and a greater escalation in Middle East tensions as the Gaza war stretches on nearly one year later.
The attack also came just hours before the first and likely only vice presidential debate between Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), offering both campaigns a timely opportunity to forecast how they would deter threats from Iran and other foreign adversaries.
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Trump echoed claims he’s made in the past about some in the U.S. military going “woke” for liberal policies and presenting weakness on the global stage. But he claimed most military members were Trump loyalists who prefer him over Democrats.
“You could keep these people that fought for me so brilliantly, you could put them in a woke cage — we call it a woke cage — for two years, scream at them only woke stuff, and when they come out, they’ll say, ‘Let’s go USA, let’s go MAGA,’” Trump said. “They’ll say, ‘We want MAGA.’ They won’t be convinced. They won’t be convinced. They’re not going to be woke. They’re not wokesters.”