MILWAUKEE — Donald Trump was mad about his microphone - again.
“Fix the mic, you got to be kidding me,” he said, pausing his recent speech here. “Do you want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage?”
The crowd clapped and cheered.
“I get so angry,” Trump continued, playing up his displeasure with a grimace. “I’m up here seething. I’m seething!”
Trump’s gripes about his microphone have become an occasional recurring feature of his rallies - a window into the candidate’s temper, his obsession with performance optics, and an extension of the show as Trump vents, riffs and performs. At one rally last month, he paced the stage for 20 minutes, unable to project his voice, then fumed that he wouldn’t pay the “stupid company that rented us this crap.” In Michigan this week, he threatened again, “Don’t pay the bill for this contractor.” Then he went to Milwaukee, where his frustrations about new tech problems seemed to boil over.
“Fix the mic!” audience members seated toward the back of Fiserv Forum began to chant. Trump ripped the microphone off its stand and kept going - but the snags continued, and the chants returned.
Trump declared it “a pretty stupid situation.”
“I’m working my ass off with that stupid mic,” he said. “And blowing out my left arm - now I’m going to blow out my right arm. I’m blowing out my damned throat too, because these stupid people …”
The crowd cheered again.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Trump said. “Pretend you’re listening to it perfectly, and I’ll come back and do another one, okay?”
He knocked the microphone against the stand, gazed around and shook his head. If this happened while he were in the White House, he said, he would fire someone - “a dopey guy like this Kelly,” he suggested, referring to John Kelly, his former chief of staff turned critic.
At first, he appeared ready to move on to another topic: The people who should be fired over the United States’ deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan.
But then someone handed Trump a new microphone.
“Hello? Is that better?” he asked. Then he yelled with a scowl: “Is that better?” He vented some more, noted this was the last of multiple events and said, “I’m a human being, right?”
The four-minute interlude came to a close with Trump reenacting his previous struggle to adjust to a microphone apparently placed too low for him, moving his hand up and down and bobbing his head as if trying to find the right distance. The audience laughed, and some of Trump’s critics shared the moment on social media and likened the gestures to a sex act.
“Way too low!” Trump said with a sour expression. “Way too low.”
At his rally in Warren, Mich., earlier that day, Trump had complained onstage about “these mic guys.”
“I’m telling you, I’m having a lot of problems with mics lately,” Trump said. “I’m not happy. Get yourself a new contractor, please, and don’t pay the bill for this contractor.”