Donald Trump played his greatest hits during a campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Tuesday night, ranting about toilets and other home appliances, and suggesting that another dead American politician is rotting in hell. But in between all that, the president found time to workshop some new material about his brinkmanship with Iran, which he of course presented as an unequivocal win.

Defending his deadly strike on Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, Trump claimed that the move is playing well with the Iranian public and that his Democratic opponents, who were enmeshed in their final debate before the Iowa caucus at the time, were terrorist sympathizers. “At my direction, the United States military launched a flawless precision strike that killed the world’s number one terrorist, number one terrorist,” he bragged to a crowd of supporters. “Great percentages of people don’t have legs right now and arms because of this son of a bitch,” Trump continued. “And the Democrats should be outraged by Soleimani’s evil crimes and not the decision to end his wretched life.”

Democrats, of course, have shown no sympathy for Soleimani, a top Iranian general with a great deal of American blood on his hands. But they have raised legitimate questions about the rationale behind the attack, and the wisdom of ratcheting up tensions that could lead to a full-blown Middle East conflagration. The administration’s justifications for the strike have more or less fallen apart, and while the two sides have since stepped back from the brink, concerns remain that the situation could still go downhill—particularly with Trump at the wheel. Though Trump is looking to turn his strategy in Iran into a foreign-policy win on the campaign trail, surveys suggest Americans are largely skeptical of his handling of the situation. An NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll released Wednesday found that more voters—49% to 42%—disapprove of his approach to Iran. That tracks with a survey last week that found a majority of Americans believe the Soleimani strike made America less safe, made an attack on the United States more likely, and may have been undertaken to distract from the impeachment proceedings.

It was during a riff on those proceedings that Trump delivered perhaps his strangest line of the night—which is saying something for a rally that included another rant about toilets, dishwashers, and showers that prevent him from adequately washing “this beautiful head of hair.” Sounding off on impeachment with familiar complaints about its deep unfairness, Trump defended his interactions with Volodymyr Zelensky and contrasted his “perfect” phone call with calls other American leaders may have made, for some reason shoehorning “tough guy” Lyndon Johnson into the aside. “Can you imagine his phone calls?” Trump said. “He’s probably looking down—or looking up—and he’s probably saying, ‘These people have gone crazy!’”

If his implication that the 36th president is in hell sounds familiar, it’s because he made the same joke, practically verbatim, about the late Democratic Congressman John Dingell at a rally last month, also while speaking about impeachment. Frustrated that Rep. Debbie Dingell, wife of the deceased lawmaker, voted to impeach him, Trump said she had thanked him profusely for giving him the “A-plus” treatment. “‘John would be so thrilled, he’s looking down, he’d be so thrilled. Thank you so much, sir,’” he recalled the Michigan congresswoman telling him. “I said that’s okay, don’t worry about it. Maybe he’s looking up, I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe.” Months earlier he implied the same thing about John McCain, albeit with a slightly different line.

Trump caught a lot of flak for those remarks, as he did for the LBJ diss. “We can listen to recordings of many of LBJ's calls and, hard as many of them can be to listen to now for many reasons, he didn’t ask foreign governments to intervene in our elections in exchange for congressionally authorized military aid,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi tweeted.

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