Trump announces ‘super range’ military installment on stump for Montana GOP candidates

KALISPELL – Crowds began lining up at Majestic Valley Arena more than seven hours before President Donald Trump touched down in the Flathead Valley on Wednesday. 

“It’s not everyday you get to see the president,” said Gayla Pettyjohn, 77, of Kalispell. “This will likely be my only chance.”

Pettyjohn said she has already voted her ballot — Republican all the way down — which is exactly how Trump told his supporters to vote on Wednesday evening. 

“Ladies and gentlemen of Montana, the golden age of America is upon us,” said Trump, who came directly from a rally he held in Arizona earlier Wednesday afternoon. “But you must get out and vote Republican if we’re going to keep it that way.”

The rally was part of a multi-state swing that has seen Trump visit reliably Republican-voting states that have federal races considered competitive this year, including Alaska, Arizona and Ohio. In Montana, the goal was to turn out Republican voters to support U.S. House candidate Aaron Flint and U.S. Senate candidate Kurt Alme. 

“Here in Montana’s first district, we’re going to defeat far-left lobbyist phony Sam Forstag, not respected at all,” Trump said. “And we’re going to elect a true American patriot, a fantastic man, a great guy, Aaron Flint, to Congress.”

During his remarks, Trump also announced that the Department of War will be establishing a new military “super range” in Montana for testing advanced weapons and technology, including autonomous weapons, space systems, electronic warfare and supersonic and hypersonic weapons. 

“Montana will continue to play a critical role in the development and testing of cutting-edge military technology,” Trump said, adding that Republican Montana Sens. Tim Sheehy and Steve Daines were behind the investment. “Steve and Tim, they were brutal. You know, I gave it just to get them to stop calling me.”

Montana’s western congressional district, a seat held by retiring Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke, is the state’s most competitive federal race this cycle, with Flint, a veteran and talk radio host, facing smokejumper Sam Forstag, a Democrat. The race is rated as a toss up in the Fox News Power Rankings. 

“We’ve known this is a battleground seat since day one,” Flint told members of the media before Trump’s arrival. “Frankly, if this was easy, I’d let somebody else do it, and I would keep enjoying, you know, my role as a statewide radio talk show host.”

Montana’s politicos show up

While the president ran a few hours behind schedule, the rally’s opening lineup of speakers included Montana’s federal delegation, Gov. Greg Gianforte, and the two hopefuls to represent Montanans in D.C.

Flint worked on Gianforte’s first campaign in 2016, and his old boss told the crowd that they were “here to get Aaron elected.” 

“(President Trump) is working hard to deliver on the promises that he made to us, the American people. But he can’t do it alone,” Gianforte said. “He needs reinforcements. He needs people like Aaron Flint, who won’t flinch at crazy far-left Democrats who attack our way of life.”

The Republicans repeatedly characterized the Democrat in the race as a member of the “crazy liberal” left, with out-of-state roots. They cited Forstag’s time lobbying at the state legislature for a firm that represented the cities of Missoula and Bozeman, and organizations such as the Montana ACLU, and his endorsements from progressive members of Congress including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as proof of an agenda Montanans should resist. 

Forstag has lived in Montana since 2012 when he started school at the University of Montana, where Flint also attended. Forstag held a rally in Bozeman on Wednesday evening, with another event in Lincoln County on Thursday with former Republican Gov. Marc Racicot, who has endorsed his campaign. 

Montana Rep. Troy Downing took the attacks a step further, calling Forstag a “commie” and saying “the Bolsheviks are at the door and we can’t let them in.”

“The changes these commies call for is no change at all, it’s destruction,” Downing said. “They want free groceries, free housing, free healthcare, free everything. You know we can give them all these things, but at what cost? I’ll tell you what it’ll cost. It’ll cost freedom.” 

A spokesperson for Forstag said the president’s trip to Montana shows that “Flint is scared.”

“Working people are suffering from the cruel, chaotic cuts that Aaron cheered on from his recording studio,” Forstag said through a spokesperson. “Empty words won’t fix that. We need solutions. So while Aaron bends over backwards for the party bosses who promised him a seat in Congress, I’ll be meeting with Montanans on both sides of the aisle.”

Flint and Forstag debated each other on Tuesday, and Flint repeated many of his attacks on his opponent on stage Wednesday. 

“If there was ever a race in the U.S. that’s the definition of common sense versus crazy, it’s this one,” Flint said when he took the stage, echoing national Republicans’ midterm tagline.

Congressional turnover

Zinke, who is from Whitefish, told members of the press before the event that he was leaving his seat in good hands and cited one of the lessons he learned in the military: “Never leave your post unless properly relieved.”

“This is a man who will fight for us, and believe me every day I’m in Washington, D.C., I fight for us because Washington, D.C., doesn’t understand Montana,” Zinke said on stage. 

While introducing his hopeful successor, Zinke spoke about Flint’s own family history growing up on both sides of the Continental Divide, including in Whitefish. 

“I know Whitefish is the blueberry in the tomato soup, but we’ll get through that,” Zinke said. (Whitefish is represented in the Montana Legislature by both a Democratic state senator and a Democratic state representative.) 

Among jabs at his opponent, Flint also showed his alignment with the president’s values, including those of Trump’s family. 

In his recent drives across the congressional district, Flint said he’d listened to the audiobook of Eric Trump’s book; and said he saw similarities between the Trump children and his own upbringing — they were tucked into bed with the same traditional bedtime prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep …”

“The son of hardworking single parents, being tucked away at night to the same prayer as the sons of a very successful billionaire in New York City, and what that tells you is, is that we’re Americans,” Flint said. “We still share the same hopes and the same dreams and the same prayers.”

Flint said he was running for office for his kids’ future, and for “that 105-year-old World War II veteran back there.”

“If that man can get off his feet for you, can you get off your asses and vote to save America this November?” Flint asked the crowd. 

Neither of Montana’s current senators spoke, as they traveled with the president after attending his rally in Arizona earlier on Wednesday, but the race to replace Daines earned Trump’s first shoutout of the night when Trump said Montanans need to defeat “radical left Dumbocrat Alani Bankhead,” running for the U.S. Senate. (“Who the hell is that?”). 

Alme, who is facing the Democrat and an independent candidate in a race rated to stay in Republican hands, touted his record as a twice-nominated U.S. Attorney for Montana (“Thank you, Mr. President, for being a job reference for me three times.”) and emphasized Republicans’ control of the Senate included keeping Montana red.

As a senator, he said he would continue fighting for “common sense policies,” including reigning in government spending and confirming judicial conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

“I’m ready to step up again, make lives more affordable, make our country safer and protect the Montana way of life,” Alme said. 

Independent Senate candidate Seth Bodnar was not mentioned in any remarks at the rally. 

Earlier on Wednesday, his campaign released an open letter to the president inviting him to meet. 

Trump stump

“Less than two years ago, our country was dead, dead, dead as a doornail. Every leader was saying it,” Trump told the Montana crowd. Now, “We’re the hottest country in the world.”

Trump’s visit came at a time when Americans — and Montanans — are deeply concerned about affordability. Flathead County has seen some of the highest increases in housing prices relative to income in the state. 

His midterm rallies are also happening as Trump has falling approval ratings nationwide, but Montana has been one of his most reliable voting bases. 

Trump won Montana’s presidential vote by margins of 21%, 16% and 20% in the last three elections. 

He said that having “record, record, record,” numbers made visiting Montana feel like coming home. 

“But I’m from 5th Avenue. It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “But actually, it makes total sense.”

Besides stumping to “get really great people in office,” Trump spent much of his hour-long speech listing  accomplishments from his two nonconsecutive terms and reasons voters should keep Republicans in office. 

He said he would, “knock this Iran thing off fast,” and that it essentially was finished as they don’t have a navy, air force or army. 

“Their leaders are gone,” he said. “I should have probably left the leaders because I don’t know who the hell we’re negotiating with.”

“One way or the other, it’s going to end very quickly, and when that happens, oil is going to come way down,” he added. 

Trump repeated many of his common rally refrains to great applause, including that he always draws the biggest crowds, that he won the 2020 election (there is no evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election won by President Joe Biden), and that Democrats would take away guns and Second Amendment rights. 

“How would you like to live up here without guns?” Trump asked. “You know who would love that to happen? Some of the wild animals you have up here that like eating you.”

Trump talked about how the previous administration had led the country into the “dark ages,” and mentioned the decrease in violent crime under his administration to historic lows, according to the FBI, as well as a reduction in illegal border crossings compared to the Biden administration. 

But a few of his lines fell flat, like his remarks about Montana’s “booming” sawmills.

“American sawmills are now supplying more lumber in the United States than at any time in almost 50 years,” Trump said, adding that if he hadn’t implemented tariffs on foreign lumber, “all your sawmills all over the state and all over other states would be closed up.” 

Scattered clapping greeted these statements, as Montana has seen the closure of major mills in recent years, with only around a half dozen still operating. 

Towards the end of his speech, Trump pushed a pledge that if Republicans hold onto the House and Senate, he will give all U.S. citizens a $5,000 dividend estimated to cost more than $1.2 trillion — more than the federal government spends on the military in a year. 

“And only a Republican president can do that,” he said. “The Democrats can’t. The reason is that we’re taking in massive amounts of money through tariffs and record-setting economic success, success like we’ve never seen before.”

Tariff revenue has climbed under Trump, but in 2025 only reached $264 billion. In recent months, tariff collections have declined and even gone negative as the federal government has had to issue refunds for tariffs deemed illegal by the Supreme Court, according to the nonpartisan organization Tax Foundation.  

Trump told voters to “pretend that I’m running,” and left Kalispell around 9 p.m., exiting the stage to the “Y.M.C.A.”

He is scheduled to be back in the White House on Thursday.