In May, 2017, Montana held a special election to fill its lone seat in the House of Representatives. The race, between Rob Quist, a Democrat, and Greg Gianforte, a Republican, was the first competitive congressional election after Donald Trump’s Inauguration as President, and it attracted national attention and pressure. On the eve of the vote, a reporter for the Guardian, Ben Jacobs, was at Gianforte’s campaign headquarters when he encountered the candidate and asked him about his party’s plans for health care. Gianforte responded by grabbing Jacobs by the neck and slamming him to the ground. “I’m sick and tired of you guys,” Gianforte told Jacobs. “You just body-slammed me and broke my glasses,” Jacobs responded. Gianforte’s campaign initially tried to blame Jacobs for the incident, but the local sheriff’s office quickly charged the candidate with misdemeanor assault. He won the election anyway, and later pleaded guilty—receiving a sentence of forty hours of community service and twenty hours of anger management—a few days before being sworn in to his new job as a member of the United States Congress.

On Thursday night, at a campaign rally in Missoula, Montana, the President repurposed this ugly incident, offering it up to his fans as a thing to delight and feel pride in. They accepted. “Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of guy,” Trump said, referring to Gianforte from the stage. Hearing a good reaction to this, Trump then told the story of how he heard about Gianforte’s assault on Jacobs. “So, I was in Rome, with a lot of the leaders from other countries, talking about all sorts of things,” he said. “And I heard about it. And we endorsed Greg very early, but I had heard that he body-slammed a reporter”—here, the President pointed at the television cameras, noting the other reporters present at the rally, making the whole profession the target—“and he was way up, and I said—this was like the day of the election or just before—and I said, ‘Oh, this is terrible, he’s going to lose the election.’ Then I said, ‘Well, wait a minute. I know Montana pretty well. I think it might help him.’ And it did.” The crowd reacted with grins, nods, and applause.

In the past few weeks, with the midterms approaching, Trump has made an obvious effort to put himself in the news more—as if it were possible for him to be any more in the news—holding rallies and doing interviews, tweeting more aggressively, saying wilder and more awful things, daring the world to keep up with him. At the moment, his Administration is taking its time deciding how to respond to the by-all-accounts horrific killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. What does context matter, though, for Trump? In Montana, on a stage, he felt that endorsing the assault of a reporter “might help.” So he did it. And, after seeing the crowd’s reaction, who around the President will protest? Not Gianforte, whose spokesperson on Thursday night put out a statement saying, “Greg will tell you he regrets what happened, he’s not perfect, he’s taken personal responsibility, this has been widely covered, he’s moved on, and that since Montanans elected him, he’s been delivering results for Montana.” The President is celebrating violence, and his supporters are moving on.