BOZEMAN, Mont. >> As former President Donald Trump continues to reach for attacks on his new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, that might halt her political momentum, he unveiled a new tactic at a rally in Bozeman on Friday night, aiming to use Harris’ own words against her.

Interrupting his typical pattern of a digressive and lengthy speech, Trump played two video compilations of past remarks by Harris that his campaign hopes will portray her as overly liberal and inept.

The first video drew on statements that Harris made during the 2020 presidential campaign, when she tacked to the left and backed progressive ideas on criminal justice reform. The second was a montage of interviews and speeches that Trump’s campaign used to mock her speaking style and insult her intelligence.

The videos did little to alter the message that the Trump campaign has deployed against Harris for weeks and that Trump summed up during his speech Friday.

“America cannot survive for four more years of this bumbling communist lunatic,” Trump told thousands gathered in the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse at Montana State University. “We cannot let her win this election.”

Trump and his allies have repeatedly tried to portray Harris as more liberal than President Joe Biden in the three weeks since he ended his campaign and cleared the way for her to be the Democratic presidential nominee.

The video compiling her past positions accused her of supporting a ban on fracking, mandatory gun buybacks and a single-payer health insurance system like “Medicare for all.”

Harris has backed away from those policy positions, which largely stem from her time in the 2020 presidential race. But Trump — who has been known to flip-flop or equivocate on hot-button issues such as abortion — argued that her early statements were the only ones that mattered.

Trump’s rally Friday was his first since Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, and he used the selection to bolster his portrait of the Democratic ticket as overly liberal.

Effectively likening Walz to a socialist, Trump accused the governor of being too lax in his response to protests that turned to riots in Minneapolis after the police murder of George Floyd and for signing a law giving access to menstrual products to transgender children.

Referring to Walz as “Comrade Walz,” Trump argued that Harris tapped him for his progressive bona fides. “This is her ideology,” he said.

Trump also acknowledged that he has frequently mispronounced Harris’ given name in recent speeches, although he added that he “couldn’t care less” how it should be pronounced. He admitted that he has in the past “done a lot of bad name-calling” in which he has purposefully mispronounced a person’s name. “They say, ‘Sir, you made a mistake,’” Trump recounted. “I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’”

Still, Trump’s speech offered continued evidence of the growing pains he has faced as he tries to shift years of attacks against Biden toward Harris.

Even as he argued that Harris was more extreme than Biden, he tied her to the president’s policies on immigration and the economy. At one point, he said she was the one running the country the past four years, even as he repeatedly argued that she was too unintelligent or incompetent to do so effectively. Trump has long made the same argument about Biden.

Trump’s rally is part of a Western swing that includes fundraisers in mountain resort towns favored by the wealthy. Before he took the stage in Bozeman, he attended an event in Big Sky, Montana, and on Saturday he will travel to fundraisers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Aspen, Colorado.

Montana is not an obvious site for a presidential campaign rally. Trump won the state handily in both 2016 and 2020, and he is expected to do so again in November. But with Republicans keen on flipping Democrats’ narrow edge in the Senate, Trump traveled to Montana to support his party’s Senate candidate there, Tim Sheehy, who is looking to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Jon Tester.

At one point, Trump, whose flight to Bozeman was diverted to Billings, Montana, after his plane suffered a mechanical issue, reflected on how long it takes to travel to Montana.

“I’ve got to like Tim Sheehy a lot to be here,” he said.