Trump Boosts Hyde-Smith’s Senate Run, Rips Obstructionist Democrats

President Donald Trump tore into congressional Democrats Tuesday opposing his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh and mocked his chief accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, while encouraging Mississippi voters Tuesday to return Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith to the Senate to fill the final two years of retired Sen. Thad Cochran’s term.

Hyde-Smith, who was state agriculture commissioner at the time, was appointed to the seat by Mississippi’s Gov. Phil Bryant (R) in March. She’s now in what appears to be virtually a dead-heat race against former Democratic Rep. Mike Espy and insurgent Tea Party conservative Chris McDaniel.

Related: ‘Vote Democrat if You Are Tired of Winning, Trump Declares

Trump was his characteristic fiery campaign trail self, sparing nothing in praise for his supporters and aiming barrage after barrage at Democrats in Washington. The rally in Southaven, Mississippi, near Memphis, Tennessee, is the second of four Make America Great Again (MAGA) campaign rallies Trump is doing this week alone.

“Exactly five weeks from today, all of this extraordinary progress is at stake. I’m not on the ballot, but in a certain way I am on the ballot,” Trump told the capacity crowd, which repeatedly cheered the president, booed Washington Democrats and hissed at members of the “fake news” media covering the rally.

“Please go out and vote, please go out and vote. On November 6, you will head to the polls in one of the most important congressional elections of our lifetime,” he said. “The only reason to vote Democrat is if you are tired of winning. A Democrat takeover of Congress will run our country into chaos and gridlock like you haven’t seen before.

“The Democrats will open our border to deadly drugs and ruthless gangs. The Democrats are the party of crime. Radical Democrats want to tear down our laws, tear down our institutions in their pursuit of power, demolish our prosperity in the name of socialism and probably worse, and abolish our borders in the service of globalism.

“There’s nothing Democrats aren’t willing to do, and you’ve seen it more in the last week than you’ve ever seen it before. And no one under any circumstances is allowed to speak up, but guess what, we’re speaking up like nobody has ever spoken up before.

“They want to get the power that they so desperately crave that was taken away from them. All the Democrats really know how to do is obstruct, resist, demolish, destroy and delay. They’ve been trying to destroy Judge Kavanaugh since the very first second he was announced because they know he will follow the Constitution as it’s written,” Trump told the loudly booing throng.

“Da Nang Richard Blumenthal … This guy lied about his service … I thought he was a great war hero, and then it turned out he was never in Vietnam — he was in the reserves.”

That brought out chants of “We Want Kavanaugh. We Want Kavanaugh. We Want Kavanaugh.”

Kavanaugh shouldn’t have to go through the kind of personal attacks Trump said just come with his job, and he held up Ford as somebody who should not be believed because of gaps in her memory:

“‘Thirty-six years ago, this happened. I had one beer.’ Well you think it was … ‘No, it was one beer.’ How did you get home? ‘I don’t remember.’ How did you get there? ‘I don’t remember.’ Where is the place? ‘I don’t remember.’ How many years ago was it? ‘I don’t remember. I don’t know, I don’t know.’ What neighborhood was it? ‘I don’t know.’ Upstairs, downstairs, where was it? ‘I don’t know. But I only had one beer, that’s the only thing I remember.'”

Trump called Kavanaugh’s Senate critics “evil,” but focused his harshest attacks on Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and his state’s former attorney general.

“Da Nang Richard Blumenthal … This guy lied about his service. He didn’t just say, ‘Gee, I was in the service.’ No, he said, ‘I was in the Marines, Da Nang Province, soldiers dying left and right as we battled up the hill.’ This went on for 15 years, when he was the attorney general of Connecticut. I thought he was a great war hero, and then it turned out he was never in Vietnam — he was in the reserves.

Related: Kavanaugh ‘Will Be Confirmed’ This Week, Cotton Predicts

“And I watched him two days ago, I watched him say, ‘We need the truth, if we don’t have …’ And here’s the guy who was saying people were dying all around him when he was never there.

“Then when they caught him, he cried, he cried like a baby. When Jimmy Swaggart cried, it was nothing compared to Da Nang Richard. Jimmy Swaggart was nothing. ‘Oh, oh, I’m so sorry.’ He only lied for 15 years, and now he gets up and he talks about lying. So Blumenthal is a fraud, he’s a fraud.”

Trump was referring to fundamentalist Christian evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who was caught up in a sex scandal in 1991 and dramatically repented amid a flood of tears on his televised program.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) also came in for Trump’s scorn.

“And then you have Cory Booker. Here’s the guy who destroyed, practically by himself, the city of Newark, New Jersey, he was such a bad mayor. And see what he wrote, himself, about women. Check it out, folks, check it out. Then he talks: ‘How dare you treat a woman like that.’ Take a look at what this guy wrote.”

Trump was referring to a 1992 Stanford campus newspaper column in which Booker described his having groped a female classmate in high school. Booker now claims he was using himself as an example of how men should not treat women.

Hyde-Smith is battling on both flanks, with Democrat Espy to her left and fellow Republican McDaniel to her right.

“I’ve been on the ballot five times. I’ve been a conservative my entire life. And I’ve ran [sic] state-wide two times and so, you know our strategy is just basically compounding the message we’ve always put out there,” Hyde-Smith told Fox News in a recent interview.

“I share the conservative values of all the Mississippians, or most of the Mississippians there. We’re running on our record. We’re running on the fact that Gov. Phil Bryant made me as the choice for the appointment. And then it’s really nice to have the president side by side in this campaign,” she said.