Did Donald Trump skip the first GOP debate because he thought it’d be a waste of time or because he’s chicken? Both are plausible explanations. But at least he made other plans. The former president wound up offering the Fox News event some eff-you counter-programming, sitting down for a chat with one of the network’s former staffers on Twitter, in a video that dropped five minutes before the debate was scheduled to begin. It…wasn’t very exciting. But it did contain some choice ramblings, including one extended, bizarre bit about Joe Biden’s beach pics.
Donald Trump rants about how physically unfit he finds President Biden:
“They love pictures of him on the beach. I think he looks terrible on the beach … There’s somebody in there that thinks he look fabulous at the beach. I think he looks horrible at the beach.” pic.twitter.com/CUm2GNICIJ
— The Recount (@therecount) August 24, 2023
During a diss session on the former president, a very low energy Trump that, at 80, his presidential successor is “worse mentally than he is physically, and physically he’s not exactly a triathlete, or any kind of an athlete.”
Trump even laid into the way Biden walks, despite that infamous ramp moment from late in his presidency. “He can’t lift his feet out of the grass, it’s only two inches at the White House, right? It’s not a lot,” he said. “But you watch him and he looks like he’s walking on toothpicks.”
He then moved onto Biden’s beach trips. “And then you see him on the beach where he can’t lift a chair,” he told Tucker. “Those chairs are meant to be light, right?”
Biden has been photographed at the beach, including this summer, which just makes Trump mad. “They love pictures of him on the beach. I think he looks terrible on the beach,” he said. He then claimed that Biden “can’t walk through the sand.” He then admitted, perhaps by accident, that “sand is not that easy to walk through,” but that when Biden “walks through it, he can’t walk through the sand.”
Trump seemed almost jealous that Biden’s beach pictures tend to be popular. “There’s somebody in there that thinks he look fabulous at the beach. I think he looks horrible at the beach,” he said. He concluded that “the beach doesn’t represent what a president’s supposed to be doing.”
So someone doesn’t like the beach, huh?
Tucker and Trump talked about a lot, though not much of it was about policy. They talked Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories. They talked about the Panama Canal at some length, for some reason. Tucker trashed his former Fox News colleague Chris Wallace.
Like Tucker’s Twitter show, it was a steep drop in excitement from his Fox News days, when he had fancy graphics and a producer and commercials. Those that tuned into the GOP debate instead at least got Chris Christie mopping the floor with Vivek Ramaswamy.