Former president Donald Trump faced online mockery after making a series of strange grunting and moaning noises during his speech at the Oakland County Republican Party Lincoln Day Dinner.
This past weekend, Mr Trump attended the dinner in Oakland, Michigan to be honoured as “Man of the Decade”.
While there, the ex-president gave a familiar speech promoting the ideas and policies that he plans to bring to the White House should he be re-elected in 2024.
One of those policies includes keeping “men out of women’s sports.”
Mr Trump claimed that transgender men who are competing in women’s weightlifting competitions are breaking records that have stood for “18 years” by lifting “one hundred pounds.”
As part of his speech, Mr Trump impersonated what he believed to be a cisgender woman attempting to lift a heavy barbell but failing. This included making grunting and moaning noises.
He went on to impersonate a transgender man, with no weightlifting experience, easily lifting the heavy barbell.
The moment Mr Trump grunted and moaned was clipped into a five-second-long video and uploaded to Twitter.
Mr Trump’s dramatic moans are part of a performative bit he has done before while ranting about transgender athletes competing in sports. The ex-president did the same thing in a speech last July as well as at a campaign rally in April.
Mr Trump shows off his grunts and moans often enough that clips of him were put together in a compilation video made by the conservative anti-Trump organisation Republican Accountability.
“We present the GOP’s leading candidate for president,” Republican Accountability wrote on Twitter.
Transgender athletes competing “unfairly” in sports has become an easy-to-use argument for some politicians to make a case against banning trans people from competing in sports.
More than 20 states have banned trans women and girls from participating on sports teams aligned with their gender.
