Trump and Sheehy train attacks on Tester in Bozeman

BOZEMAN — By the time Donald Trump reached the stage of his Bozeman rally Friday night, he had landed at two different Montana airports and snaked through the winding turns of Gallatin Canyon in a long motorcade.

The distance to reach any place in Montana stuck with him. 

“I’ll tell you I know Montana better than you know, but I was all over your state today. Everything’s two hours. ‘When are we going to be here?’ ‘Two hours, sir, two hours,’” Trump recounted. “I got to like Tim Sheehy a lot to be here.” 

The speech that followed, delivered to a packed audience of 8,000 at Montana State University, where some attendees had waited in the parking lot since at least 6 a.m., was also about two hours long.

The president didn’t relay the problems encountered by his private Boeing 757, “Trump Force One,” which the Associated Press reported had to land in Billings before Trump continued on to Bozeman.

Trump unpacked his still-developing attack on Democratic nominee for president Kamala Harris while stirring in several references to President Joe Biden. At times, Trump referred to Biden’s presidency in the past tense, suggesting Harris had been running the White House from behind the scenes since the beginning. At other times Trump suggested Harris was “too dumb” to be president and has a low IQ.

“And Kamala, it’s not just, she’s not just dangerously extreme, and she is extreme, much more than Joe Biden, because Biden didn’t know he was alive,” Trump said. “Are you a socialist? ‘What does that mean?’ Are you a communist, Joe? ‘I don’t know.’ So dangerous because the people around the Resolute Desk ran the country. Don’t forget they went after me. I don’t believe it was him, it was the people, I can name every one of them. They’re bad people, and we won our big case in Florida. Great, brilliant judge that was so smart and strong and she didn’t listen to the nonsense. And you know they played the ref with judges, they criticize them all the time, scream at them, threaten them horribly. Justices, the justices of the Supreme Court, all judges. And they think they’re playing the ref like the great Bobby Knight.”

Trump didn’t need to name the Florida case for a MAGA crowd that nodded along. The case, brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against Trump for allegedly possessing boxes of top-secret documents illegally at his Mar-a-Lago resort years after leaving office, was known to all, not least because conservative pundits and Trump have “played the ref” with regular attacks on the justice system.

The rally was Trump’s sixth in Montana since 2016, the most of any American president. All but the first of those Montana appearances have been aimed at unseating U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, Montana’s only statewide elected Democrat. Ahead of the rally, Tester’s campaign published a large ad in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle featuring endorsements by dozens of Republicans, including several former officeholders at every level of state government. But Trump’s swats at Tester emphasized that the farmer-politician from Big Sandy isn’t part of Trump’s club.

Trump called Tester “fat,” and said that for all the times the senator has suggested he has worked with Trump, he hasn’t. But then Trump circled back to a now-six-year-old political ulcer the former president has never gotten over: Tester’s role in ending former Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson’s nomination to direct the Department of Veterans Affairs. 

Tester in 2018 said several witnesses had told him that Jackson, who was then Trump’s White House physician, “was known as the Candyman” for freely distributing controlled substances. CNN reported that Jackson was under scrutiny for being drunk overseas when traveling as the physician to then-President Barack Obama.

Trump had invoked Jackson’s name repeatedly during his four 2018 Montana campaign stops to support Republican Matt Rosendale’s unsuccessful challenge to Tester. On Friday, Jackson, now a U.S. representative from Texas, took the stage for an emotional, rapid-fire airing of grievances. 

“[Tester] said that I was recklessly prescribing narcotics. I can tell you, I can count right here on this hand, right here, how many times I prescribed narcotics at the White House in 14 years,” Jackson said. “He put that out there. He said that I got drunk and wrecked the government vehicle. Any two-bit investigator can figure out whether or not that happened. He knew it didn’t happen. He knew it, and it’s been proven that it didn’t happen since then. He did not care. He was going to destroy me to better his career.”

Jackson’s troubles didn’t end with Tester, as the ranking member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in 2018, disclosing concerns about the physician’s ethics. In March of this year several media outlets reported that the U.S. Navy demoted Jackson to captain in 2022 after a Pentagon investigation substantiated the allegations against him. Jackson has repeatedly misstated his rank following the demotion, including during his 2022 campaign for a seat in Congress. 

Shortly before Trump took the stage, Sheehy delivered his own message, starting with an anecdote about middle-schoolers inverting the letters in his name to “he-she” and teasing him during his Minnesota childhood in the mid-1990s. It’s a story he’s told several times, including at the Republican National Convention in July. There he segued into a “boys are boys and girls are girls” opposition to equal treatment of transgender Americans.

“That is a joke, but it’s also an illustration of the lunacy we’re seeing in America right now, where we are telling our boys that they’re girls and our girls that they’re boys,” Sheehy said. 

Sheehy accused Tester of supporting federal policies expanding rights for transgender people before transitioning to a defense of his business, Bozeman-based Bridger Aerospace, which, by its own accounts, shoulders tens of millions of dollars in debt.

“Jon Tester attacks my company every single day, and it’s disgusting,” Sheehy said. “He should be ashamed of that, just like he attacks my war record. And you know why he attacks my war record, because he doesn’t have one. He attacks my business because he’s never started one.”

Tester’s business, T-Bone Farms, is a working farm in north-central Montana. 

“I’m thrilled that President Trump is supporting us. He’s the first president of a generation not to enter us into a foreign war. He built the strongest economy in a generation, to secure the border in a generation, and he showed strength on the world stage. And we’re going to send him back to the White House in November,” Sheehy said. “But you have a very important job to do, because if Donald Trump gets to the White House and doesn’t have a Senate, he’s not going to get things done.”