Donald Trump was corrected by a rally-goer when his familiar warning that the planet is heading for a Third World War unless he reclaims the White House unexpectedly went awry.
The Republican presidential nominee has regularly dealt in apocalyptic rhetoric this election cycle and routinely predicts that a new international conflict will erupt if he does not return to the Oval Office in November.
But, while speaking at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s McCamish Pavilion in Atlanta on Monday, Trump unexpectedly fluffed his lines.
“We’re close to World War Two because we have people in the White House that…” he said.
At that moment, a rally attendee in the front row quickly called up to the podium to correct him. The former president then swiftly corrected course, saying: “World War Three! Ha!”
Grinning, he twice broke off to thank the amateur fact-checker before resuming his speech.
Elsewhere during his address to the Peach State, Trump took the opportunity to lash out at former first lady Michelle Obama, who had lambasted him at a Kamala Harris event in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday by accusing him of “gross incompetence”, “erratic behavior” and “obvious mental decline.”
“You know who was nasty to me? Michelle Obama,” he said, prompting a loud chorus of boos, jeers and shouts from his audience.
“Ooooooh! I always tried to be so nice and respectful. Oooooh! She opened up a little bit of a… a little bit of a box. She opened up a little bit of something.
“She was nasty, whooo! Shouldn’t be that way. That was a big mistake that she made. With your support on November 5 we will achieve success that no one can imagine.”
Trump then turned his ire on Harris, inviting chants of “Lock her up!”, which prompted him to muse that, as president, he could have had his 2016 challenger Hillary Clinton jailed, as he had long threatened, but claimed he ultimately decided against it on national unity grounds.
From there, Trump also denied using a teleprompter for his public addresses despite having one positioned right next to him as he said it, insisted that he was “the opposite of a Nazi” in response to recent reporting about his alleged admiration for Adolf Hitler, and launched into a bizarre fantasy about Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene meeting a fiery death in a hypothetical hydrogen car explosion.
Further immigration scaremongering followed, he again referred to Harris – a former California attorney general – as “a low IQ individual”, baselessly warned his audience that their children would be drafted into the military if the Democrat won and then badly misspoke as he attempted to call his rival a “train wreck” – ironically, just after claiming she could not “put two sentences together.”
Although the race between Trump and Harris is still too close to call in the polls one week out from Election Day, Trump has faced a week of damage control after his former White House chief of staff John Kelly’s characterized him as a “fascist” and fresh controversy erupted following his Madison Square Garden rally .
At the New York City rally on Sunday, Trump and a collection of his most prominent MAGA cheerleaders like Elon Musk, Rudy Giuliani and Hulk Hogan took to the stage to paint a disturbing vision of America under a potential Harris administration.
But it was comedian Tony Hinchcliffe who stole the headlines with a racist joke describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” The line inspired an angry backlash from Latino celebrities, politicians on both sides of the aisle and even the Archbishop of San Juan, raising questions about the impact on voting in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, where half a million people of Puerto Rican heritage reside.
