Barack Obama doubled down on concerns about Donald Trump’s age and competency at a rally alongside Gov. Tim Walz in Wisconsin on Tuesday, one of the former president’s latest campaign stops as he’s hit the campaign trail on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris.
The high-profile surrogate was making a case that his party has been making more broadly now that they have Harris, 60, running against Trump, 78. It’s a much easier lift for them than earlier this cycle when President Joe Biden was the candidate facing questions about mental acuity.
“You’d be worried if grandpa was acting like this, right? You’d call up your brother. You’d call up your cousins. You’d say, ‘Have you noticed?’ But this is coming from somebody who wants unchecked power,” Obama said. “Wisconsin, we do not need to see what an older, loonier Donald Trump looks like with no guardrails.”
He said Trump’s recent town hall in Pennsylvania, where he stopped answering crowd questions and danced for more than half an hour, is an example of Trump’s declining mental faculties and that even members of his party are noticing.
“The governor from South Dakota [Gov. Kristi Noem], she’s standing there with this weird look on her face, like she doesn’t really know what’s going on,” Obama said. “It’s like a hostage video.”
The Trump campaign and a spokesperson for Noem did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Obama wasn’t the only one making this case at the rally.
“It takes stamina to be president, and Donald Trump does not have stamina. He has been rambling more than the normal rambling,” Walz said. “He dropped down to three interviews, and his staff, in a moment of clarity and truth, said he was exhausted.”
Walz pointed to Trump’s refusal to debate Harris as evidence of Trump’s incompetence and said that Trump knew he had lost the last debate against Harris: “You can’t blame him,” Walz said. “When you get your ass whipped that hard, you don’t come back for seconds.”
Obama joined Walz at the Madison rally on the state’s first day of early voting, hoping to energize voters in the state that turned out for him in 2008 and 2012; Obama won Wisconsin by nearly 14% and 7% in those elections, respectively.
—
Emily Kennard is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.