MIKEY SMITH: 7 unhinged Donald Trump moments – his antisemitic slur and White House UFC match

Donald Trump got his bill through.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act became law yesterday – making ICE the best funded law enforcement agency possibly ever while slashing healthcare for millions of Americans.

And while Democrats ran off to start making attack ads for the midterms, Trump celebrated with a rally in Iowa.

And it was such a bonkers affair, we’ve dedicated today’s entire roundup to it.

Strap in, it’s a wild one. Everything is fine.

1. Trump is back on his mad statue garden idea

Since 2020, Trump has been trying to get a garden built in South Dakota (for some reason), with 250 statues depicting notable Americans.

It was his way of addressing conservative grievances sparked by protesters and states removing statues of slave owners and civil war traitors at the time.

And not only is he still banging on about it, it’s finally got funding. There’s $40 million in his healthcare-slashing budget bill for it.

The initial list, which included evangelical leader Billy Graham, 19th-century politician Henry Clay, frontiersman Davy Crockett, first lady Dolley Madison and conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, was described by James Grossman of the American Historical Association as varying from “odd to probably inappropriate to provocative”.

The list has since been expanded to include Frank Sinatra, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Woody Guthrie and Dr Seuss.

Despite being announced in 2020, the White House says it won’t open until at least 2029.

2. He told a story about himself that was just a string of false memories

I’m going to take the anecdote step-by-step.

“You know, they took down a lot of our statues, they took down statues of some of the greatest people we ever had living. I stopped them from taking down Thomas Jefferson. They wanted to take the Thomas Jefferson memorial. They wanted to rip the hell out of the statue inside.”

• This didn’t happen. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, many statues of slave-owning American historical figures were removed around the US – including a few of Jefferson. And a Washington DC city committee suggested “recontextualising” the capital’s Jefferson Memorial – but the suggestion was not taken up by Mayor Muriel Bowser.
• Unless he’s talking about New York’s city hall, or Jefferson High School in Portland Oregon, there haven’t been any serious attempts to have Jefferson statues removed.

“We stopped them. We signed a law. Do you remember that night? It was crazy.”

• Nobody remembers that night, because it didn’t happen. Crazy? Sure.

“They were marching toward the Jefferson Memorial…”

• We think the night he’s talking about was June 23, 2020. But there was no march toward, or attempt to tear down the statue of Thomas Jefferson.
• There was, on the other hand, some vandalism of the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Park.

“…I took out an old bill from 1909…old, because today they don’t do these things. They don’t do it like they used to…”

• The “bill” he’s referring to is the Veterans’ Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act, which was threatened at the time. It was signed not in 1909, but in 2003 by President George W Bush.
• Other than a joint resolution authorising the erection of a memorial to Alexander Hamilton in Washington DC, no laws were passed by congress in 1909 that had anything to do with statues or memorials. We checked.

“…it said if you so much as touch a monument or statue you go to jail for a 10 year period. No anything.”

• The law he’s talking about has a ten year maximum sentence for “wilfully injuring or destroying or attempting to injure or destroy” a “statue commemorating the service of any person(s) in the US armed forces.” The ten years was a maximum, not a minimum.
• Also, while Thomas Jefferson was a colonel in the Albemamrle County Militia, he never saw combat. He never served in the Continental Army – the precursor to the US armed forces. While other laws could have been invoked, it’s not likely the law in question would have applied to a statue of him.

“In the middle of their march I gave a news conference and I said anyone who touches – and I’m signing – immediately goes to jail for a ten year period…”

• There was no news conference. The threat was made in a tweet. This tweet.

• And nobody would have “immediately” gone to jail for 10 years. Due process would have taken place. They would have to be tried and convicted.

“That march broke up so quickly you wouldn’t believe.”

• We definitely wouldn’t believe it, because it didn’t happen.

So there was no news conference, but a tweet. The thing he “signed” was an executive order, several days later. The law was from 2003 and not 1909, and he didn’t threaten to immediately imprison people without trial for a decade. Oh, and he mixed up Thomas Jefferson, the second president, with Andrew Jackson, the seventh.

Aside from that? All true.

3. He announced a UFC fight on the grounds of the White House

“We’re going to have a UFC fight. We’re going to have a UFC fight,’ Trump said. “Think of this – on the grounds of the White House.”

“We have a lot of land there,” he continued. “We’re going to build a little – we’re not, Dana’s going to do it, Dana’s great, one of a kind – we’re going to have a UFC fight, championship fight, full fight, like 20-25,000 people.”

Because, of course he did. He’s good pals with UFC chief Dana White.

And by good pals, I mean he’s donated more than a million dollars to Trump and to pro-Trump campaign organisations.

4. He suggested there are 2 billion family farms that are likely to have more than $28 million

“Very importantly for Iowa,” Trump said, “this bill rescues over 2 billion family farms from the so-called estate tax or the death tax.”

Even if there were 2 billion farms in America, which there clearly aren’t, the US version of inheritance tax is only paid by estates worth more than $14 million – or $28 million for a couple.

A vanishingly small number of family farms would ever pay the estate tax. It only applies to 0.2% of households in the entire country.

5. He used an antisemitic slur

Touting his opposition to inheritance taxes, Trump said: “Think of that, no death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases a fine banker, and in some cases Shylocks and bad people.”

Shylock is the name of the Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and over the centuries, the character became an antisemitic trope —a greedy, vengeful, untrustworthy Jew.

6. He suggested autism must be “artificially induced”

“We have a statistic on autism that’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” Trump said.

“And [RFK Jr] gonna change it. It used to be that 20 years ago you just didn’t have it, and now it’s numbers that are unbelievable. The numbers are so bad it’s gotta be artificially induced.”

Most actual scientists put the increase in autism numbers down to increased awareness, broader diagnostic criteria, and improved screening methods.

Similarly, before the early 1900s, there was a vanishingly small proportion of Americans who were left handed, and now it’s roughly 10%.

That’s not because something in the water in the 1920s made people left handed, it’s because people didn’t believe left-handedness existed – or where it did occur, they thought it was the mark of the devil.

7. He claimed it didn’t rain on his parade

“It never rained,” he said of the day he made the US Army roll tanks through Washington DC to celebrate his birthday.

“And then I thought to myself – global warming. They’re telling us what’s gonna happen in 250 years to our planet, but they can’t tell us it’s gonna rain 3 hours before the event… you’re gonna have more oceanfront property if that happens.”

I was there. It did rain. Not a lot, but enough for me to get wet and have to put my laptop away.

Trump may not have noticed because he was on a stage with a roof.