It was business as usual for Donald Trump yesterday, who delivered a rambling speech full of not-quite-truths and ‘accordion’ hand gestures.
Yet it wasn’t the US President who was the star of the show in Marietta, Georgia, but a random man in the audience.
Throughout the 74-minute rally at Wheeler High School, the audience member mocked Trump’s mannerisms.
He scrunched his mouth into an O-shape, as Trump so often does, waved his hands and wobbled his head back and forth as Trump spoke.
As Trump described the dragged-out war with Iran as a ‘skirmish’ or boasted about US employment rates, the suited man mimicked him.
At one point, he turned to two people sitting next to him, who all burst out laughing between claps while looking at their phones.
When Trump finished his speech, the man continued to do his best impression of the Republican leader by dancing like him.
The uncanny moment was captured by press photographers.
Clips of the attendee’s impersonations went viral on social media, though some X users said they could not see the joker.
The man was visible in some broadcasts of the speech but not all as each network’s camera was positioned slightly differently.
Some of the footage shared widely online was captured by the Conservative news channel, Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN), as well as by the White House itself.
Who the man is or what his intentions were are unclear. The White House has been approached for comment.
He was reminiscent of the ‘plaid shirt guy’, a, well, plaid shirt-wearing guy whose face behind Trump at a 2018 rally in Montana became a meme.
Then-high school student Tyler Linfest watched Trump rattle on about tax reform and the media with a bewildered, sceptical expression.
He told CNN that he signed up to go to the rally to hear what the American leader had to say.
‘All of those reactions were my actual reactions,’ he said.
‘I would have made those faces if anyone were to say that to me. I was not trying to protest, those were just my actual, honest reactions.’
Trump says communists are going to ‘blow up’ US landmark
Trump described the way he talks as ‘weaving’ during a Johnstown, Pennsylvania, campaign rally in 2024.
‘I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, “It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen”, he said.
And Trump was very much wheezing when speaking yesterday, as he claimed that ‘communists’ were trying to ‘blow up Mount Rushmore’ and that we once had ‘transgender for everybody’.
Trump also referred to the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow shipping route along Iran’s southern coast, as ‘Hormuz Street’.
He also compared Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff to ‘Pinky Herman’, appearing to fumble the name of Pee-wee Herman, the bowtie-wearing alter-ego of comedian Paul Reubens.
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