Sweaty Trump loses it over questions about if he is skipping Kansas rally because of his health
President Donald Trump unloaded on a reporter who questioned why he canceled a Saturday appearance at a Kansas rally, one of his only scheduled campaign-trail appearances the weekend before Election Day.
Trump, who appeared to be sweating as he briefly addressed reporters following his remarks at a campaign rally in South Carolina, called a reporter “way out of shape” and mocked them for asking whether he was “feeling well.”
“You know what the reason is? I don’t feel I have to go to Kansas,” he told reporters Thursday. “He said, ‘You’re not going to Kansas, sir, are you feeling well?’ You’ve been following me for two weeks. I feel perfect.”
He then called the reporter “disgusting.”
“Put yourself in shape,” he said. “You look like hell.”
The president will instead participate in a series of virtual rallies. It’s unclear whether he will reschedule the Kansas event, or if his Sunday rally in Iowa is still in the cards.
Trump was scheduled to appear at Salina Regional Airport to support embattled Republican incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall, who is polling closely in a race for re-election against Democratic candidate and pastor Adam Hamilton. The last time voters in the state elected a Democratic U.S. senator was in 1939.
Pieter Miller, executive director of the Salina Airport Authority, said “all Salina events are cancelled” due to the president’s schedule.
Protesters repeatedly interrupted the president’s last appearance in the state, which Trump falsely claimed were “paid” to be there. At least 11 people were escorted from the Heartland Credit Union Arena in Park City that night.
It was at that event where the president invoked the antisemitic slur “shylock” while defending Marshall’s history of suing former patients for failing to pay medical debt when he worked as an OB-GYN.
“And they made it like, oh, he was some kind of a shylock-type guy. And if he didn’t make these requests, he would be breaking the law,” Trump said at the Kansas rally earlier this month. “He would have been breaking a very strong criminal law, and he would be subject to criminal arrest and liability. And he didn’t do it. He has a law firm that did it.”
Kansas GOP Chair Danedri Herbert told The Kansas City Star that she heard about the president’s plans to scrap the event through the Republican National Committee.
“That’s all they told me that it was canceled and we’d get more information,” she said. “They are going to do a series of telerallies but I don’t have any information about those.”
Rob Fillion, executive director for the Kansas Republican Party, told Wichita’s CBS affiliate KWCH that “Salina and Kansas are very important to our nation, but there are a lot of other races that are in play.”
