Trump Rails Against Broken Rally Teleprompters, Threatens to Stiff Contractors (2024)

It was hot at Donald Trump‘s Las Vegas rally. So much so, the former president remarked on how the heat was affecting him (not so much his supporters) and railed against his malfunctioning teleprompters, threatening not to pay the contractor who set them up.

“It’s 110 [degrees], but it doesn’t feel it to me … If anybody goes down, we have people, they’ll pick you up right away. They’ll throw water… Everybody was so worried yesterday about you, and they never mentioned me,” Trump said, although it was just shy of 100 degrees at the Las Vegas airport near the venue at the time he spoke. “I’m up here sweating like a dog. Secret Service said, ‘We gotta keep everybody safe.’ They don’t think about me. I’m working my ass off. I’m working hard. This is hard work.”

Trump also went on multiple tangents about his teleprompters not working. “I’ve got no teleprompters, and I haven’t from the beginning,” he said. “I pay all this money to teleprompter people, and I’d say 20 percent of the time they don’t work. The thing’s waving around, they can’t tie it a little bit tighter? So we’re all in this together — just a mess!”

Later in the rally, Trump again whined that the teleprompters were not working and, in alignment with his longtime business practices, vowed not to pay the company contracted to set up the teleprompters.

“Tell them to make the microphone louder. It’s terrible! Are the teleprompters not working? Not even a little bit,” Trump said. “Great job! And then I don’t pay the company that does it, right? Then I end up with a story, ‘Trump doesn’t pay.’ I don’t pay contractors that do a shitty job, and that’s a shitty job. You can’t read a word. But you know what, it usually ends up that the speech is better. It’s crazy.”

Trump loves to claim he doesn’t “need” a teleprompter. But each time they don’t perform as expected, he rants about it. During the rally, he also complained that the microphone wasn’t loud enough.

“When I have a good contractor or subcontractor, nobody gets paid faster,” Trump continued. “But when I have contractors that do this kind of work, you can have them! Can you imagine if Biden was up — he’s no good with the teleprompter, he’s the worst I’ve seen — but could you imagine if the teleprompters went off? Here’s Biden. He wouldn’t even say anything, he isn’t capable.”

Trump next did an impression of Biden leaving a stage. “This guy is the worst,” he said before lying that the 2020 election was “rigged and stolen.”

Trump then turned to his legal troubles. He has been convicted in New York for falsifying business records and indicted in Florida, D.C., and Georgia. “When they indicted me over nothing, he opened a whole box. And then I was indicted, indicted, and indicted again! I was never indicted [before]. In this little tiny period of time, I was link a ping pong ball: ‘Sir, they indicted you here. They indicted you in Georgia. They indicted you in New York. Then they indicted you again in New York, sir.’

“A disgrace, a disgrace,” Trump said before bragging that his conviction led to a significant increase in donations.

“Largest fundraiser in the period of one week than anyone has ever had,” Trump claimed. “We took in hundreds of millions of donations … And our poll numbers are higher now than before.”

Except that’s not what the poll numbers show. It’s true his conviction has been a fundraising book, but in the weeks since he was found guilty, Trump has lost some support among swing voters, and one in 10 Republicans said the conviction makes them less likely to vote for him.

Continuing to wail about his legal troubles, Trump laid into Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the prosecution against Trump for mishandling classified information. The former president called Smith “deranged” and “a dumb son of a bitch,” then told the crowd, “The whole world is laughing. Except the fake news back there.” Trump pointed toward the back of the crowd, where mostly friendly outlets were covering his speech.

On Monday, Trump is scheduled for a pre-sentencing interview related to his New York conviction on 34 charges for falsifying business records when he tried to cover up his hush-money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.