Former U.S. president Donald Trump said that the unfolding Iranian attacks on Israel are the result of the Biden administration exhibiting “weakness” on the world stage at his Pennsylvania rally Saturday night.
“Before going any further, I wanna say: God bless the people of Israel. They’re under attack right now, because we show great weakness,” Trump said.
The remarks come as Tehran has launched a barrage of missile and drone strikes toward Israel on Saturday in retaliation for a deadly attack on an Iranian embassy in Damascus earlier this month. Tehran has blamed the embassy attack—which killed a top Iranian commander—on Israel, which has yet to publicly claim responsibility for the assassination.
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While U.S. forces have been helping to intercept the attacks on Israel, the full extent of the damage from the bombardment remains unclear. That did not, however, stop Trump from declaring that the “attack that would not have happened” if he were still in office.
The crowd in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania—which waited almost an hour for Trump to come on stage—broke into a “genocide Joe” chant shortly thereafter.
“They’re not wrong, they’re not wrong,” Trump said. “He’s done everything wrong.”
Over the course of his rally, Trump repeatedly bashed Biden as “crooked Joe,” calling him “a tyrant” and even going so far as to say “everything he touches turns to shit.”
Trump, a staunch supporter of Israel, has previously urged the country to hurry up its war with Hamas and criticized the military’s killing of civilians because he thought it amounted to bad optics.
The former president’s anti-Biden screed on Saturday wasn’t limited to foreign policy. After addressing the Iran strikes, Trump moved onto another tangent about electric vehicles.
“I mean, to think about what we have to go through, and the things we put up with, with the border, with no energy independence,” Trump said, despite domestic oil production reaching all-time highs under President Joe Biden, “with all electric cars—would anybody like to buy an electric car for the rest of your life?”
Trump then ranted about being stuck in court as jury selection begins in the Manhattan hush money case, describing his legal woes as a symptom of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
“We’re going communist, don’t kid yourself,” Trump said at another point. “If we don’t win this election, this country is finished.”
