Trump Rambles About Toilets Not Flushing During Ohio Rally … Oh, and Also: Hijacking America’s Election Systems

Donald Trump has been holding rallies rallies to prop up his preferred 2022 congressional candidates for a while now. There isn’t much that differentiates one from another. He stirs up fear about immigrants. He rants about the 2020 election, claiming falsely that it was stolen. He bashes President Biden as incompetent. He teases that he’s going to run again in 2024. He throws a few brief nods to the local Republican or Republicans he’s supporting. On Saturday night in Delaware, Ohio, it was J.D. Vance, whom he recently endorsed for Senate. “He said some really bad shit about me,” Trump said, referencing Vance’s past criticism before calling him the party’s best chance to beat the “radical Democrat nominee.”

It’s a familiar routine for Trump, and on Saturday he seemed a little more bored than usual at whatever was scrolling across his teleprompter. His coif fluttering in a light breeze for the duration of his time onstage, the former president went on multiple extended, incredibly bizarre rants about topics that don’t really have much to do with anything.

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He revived his years-long crusade against America’s water pressure, claiming people don’t have enough water to run dishwashers, that water doesn’t come out of the shower heads of new hotels, and that regarding “the third element of bathrooms” people have to flush 10 times for anything to happen.

Trump says he fixed all of this, only for Biden to ruin everything.

He spoke at length about the aptitude test he “aced” while he was in office, claiming he got tired of people calling him stupid so he went to “Doc Ronny” (former White House doctor and current Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson) to ask if there was any way he could prove to America he wasn’t a moron. “I have great heritage,” Trump said, “an uncle who was a great, great genius, a father who was a genius.” Jackson suggested an aptitude test, “an X test,” but warned Trump that it could be embarrassing if he didn’t pass it. Trump says he was unfazed:

“GIMME THAT TEST, DOC RONNY!”

Trump at one point changed gears in the middle of making a point because he caught a glimpse of himself on a screen. “What a handsome president,” he said. He noted how he asks Melania how he looks on TV after rallies, particularly about the status of his hair, leading to one of several rants about how the TV cameras never show the size of his crowds. He also claimed the cameras turn off whenever he starts talking about the 2020 election. “Even now as I speak, two of the lights just went off,” he lied at one point. “This is communism. This is the beginning of communism.”

The crowd laughed and cheered and applauded at all of Trump’s nonsense on Saturday night, which is part of why he’s so dangerous. Trump is talking about aptitude tests and crowd sizes, but he’s also talking about the forceful takeover of the nation’s voting systems. He talked about how state-level Republicans like Kari Lake in Arizona are trying to overturn the legitimate 2020 election results and working to do away with electronic voting in future elections. He said Mark Zuckerberg shouldn’t have been allowed to donate millions to strengthening election systems in areas where there aren’t enough resources to maintain them. He touted a new documentary that falsely claims the 2020 election was stolen. He called for the end of all early voting, mail-in voting, and drop box voting.

Trump wants people to vote for J.D. Vance and the scores of other local and national candidates he has endorsed not because he thinks they’ll go to bat for the people of Ohio or whichever state they’re vying to represent, but because he knows they’ll go along with his push to cripple the democratic process and allow Republicans to overturn the results of elections they lose, which he and his administration, and sitting members of Congress, tried do to after his loss to President Biden in 2020. They’re now in the midst of a very real effort to rig the system so they won’t fail next time.

Meanwhile, everyone is laughing about Trump saying he needs to flush the toilet a bunch of times.

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