'Eliminate the presidency': Trump candidate melts down in bonkers Fox interview

Republican Ed Gallrein, President Donald Trump’s handpicked candidate to replace Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), wrongly claimed Democrats plan to “eliminate the presidency," “eliminate the Senate" and insisted that the president "knew I farted in church in the second grade."

Gallrein made the claims Tuesday in an interview with LiveNOW from FOX, a streaming news channel run by Fox Television Stations, one week before the Nov. 3 election.

The former Navy SEAL beat Massie in the May Republican primary by 10,283 votes. The race spent more than $32 million on ads, the most ever for a House primary.

Gallrein now faces Democrat Melissa Strange and Libertarian Jeremy Todd in a district that major election forecasters rate solidly Republican.

Trump recruited Gallrein to take on Massie last year.

“I was not told why when I entered the White House to meet him in the Oval Office,” Gallrein said of their meeting last October. “But he asked me to go home, think about it, pray on it.”

“Look at this beautiful guy,” Trump said of Gallrein at a rally in Highland Heights, Kentucky, on Oct. 17, according to the Associated Press. “Central casting.”

Ten days later, LiveNOW host Josh Breslow asked Gallrein whether he could break with Trump, as Massie had. Gallrein replied, “The great news is I have an open relationship with the president.”

The candidate Trump praised for his looks answered a question about his independence by pointing to his closeness to Trump.

“He knows I’m a Reagan Republican,” Gallrein continued. “He knows everything about me. He had my top secret SCI [security clearance] record when I met with him. He knew I farted in church in the second grade at Saint Paul’s and got a whooping by Sister Mary Folgins.”

“I want to also add that as a career military officer, it is not lost on me that I took an oath to only two things: the Lord and the Constitution,” Gallrein said earlier in the same answer.

“So I have to point out that we are facing the four horsemen of the apocalypse that want to destroy the United States of America both directly and indirectly,” Gallrein said when asked about the nation’s biggest security threat, naming Iran, Russia, China and North Korea. “And the other thing is what they’re doing internally to divide us.”

“You’ve got one party that’s essentially advancing the Communist Manifesto that’s deeply rooted in atheism and godless beliefs, versus the Constitution that’s rooted in the fiery birth of our nation’s liberties and the Bible,” Gallrein said in his closing remarks.

“We had an administration that ushered in and invited the invasion of Ukraine,” he added. “We had a nation that was aiding and abetting Iran and their nuclear weapons program.”

Gallrein also said that “20 months ago, we had open borders and north of 20 million people flooded into this nation.” But the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-leaning think tank, estimated that 15.4 million people in total were living in the country illegally as of January 2025, The Dispatch reported.

“And they’ve said what they’re going to do,” Gallrein said. “People need to remember. They’ve laid their cards on the table. You know, eliminate the presidency, eliminate the Senate, you know, pack the Supreme Court and a number of other things, add two states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, so they never lose the Senate again.”

Gallrein did not name any Democrat who has called for abolishing the presidency or the Senate. There is also no evidence that the Democratic platform calls for "advancing the Communist Manifesto" or is "deeply rooted in atheism and godless beliefs."