DETROIT ― Donald Trump held a rally here Friday night, promising to rescue the city he has recently held up as a symbol of American decline.
It was in many ways a typical Trump speech before adoring supporters, most of whom waited hours in line to attend.
The Republican presidential nominee started out reciting his standard stump speech, touching on policy areas such as trade and immigration. Then, somewhere around the 50-minute mark — and following a roughly 20-minute interruption when the center’s microphones failed — he began what he has started calling his “weave,” wandering off into other topics and pausing to introduce local celebrities.
But the former president was speaking at the Huntington Place, the downtown convention hall that played a central role in Trump’s efforts to contest Michigan’s votes in the 2020 election.
And that was just one of the ways the site gave Friday’s event a unique flavor.
JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
The speech was barely a week removed from Trump’s last appearance in the city, at the Detroit Economic Club, where he warned that the city’s problems with crime, poverty and unemployment were an example of what would happen if Democrats hold power after the November election.
“Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president,” Trump said at that event, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. “You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”
The comments drew rebukes from officials and civic leaders, who pointed to widely acknowledged signs of a rebounding city, including declines in crime and unemployment rates. Even some Trump allies questioned whether insulting the biggest city in the key swing state made sense politically.
Trump on Friday didn’t try to walk back his comments. But he did give them more of a positive spin by saying he would help the city regain the wealth and stature it had after World War II, when it was flush with money from its thriving auto industry.
“We’ll be talking about the Michigan miracle,” Trump said, adding later, “I will put Detroit first, I will put Michigan first and I will put America first, and that’s the way it is.”
Audience members, many of them waving official “Make Detroit great again” placards, cheered.
Trump suggested he would accomplish this through two main policy levers: his proposal for across-the-board tariffs and his vow to end what he calls the “electric vehicle mandate,” the combination of federal subsidies and tighter emission standards Democrats have enacted in order to promote the clean energy industry.
“It will be economic Armageddon for Detroit,” Trump said.
Economists from across the ideological spectrum have warned that Trump’s tariffs could harm, maybe even devastate, the economy, effectively functioning as a tax that raises prices, even though Trump is vowing to reduce inflation.
Auto industry analysts, for their part, have warned that the clean energy subsidies Trump has vowed to halt are underwriting a factory-building boom across the South and Midwest and that, without such support, U.S. carmakers could actually lose their chance to compete in the growing global market for more fuel-efficient vehicles.
The debate over the future of the auto industry is especially important in Michigan, whose electoral votes are critical to both candidates’ strategies. That helps explain why Harris was also in Michigan on Friday and included on her itinerary a visit to a United Auto Workers union hall in Lansing, where a federal grant will help upgrade an assembly plant in order to produce electric vehicles.
But Detroit and the auto industry were just one focus of Trump’s speech.
Trump also reprised familiar arguments about undocumented immigrants, calling America an “occupied country.”
And near the end of his speech, he attacked Democrats for their support of transgender rights. To do that, he showed a video — one of several clips he aired during the speech — juxtaposing scenes from “Full Metal Jacket,” a 1987 war movie, with videos of drag influencers on social media.
Trump’s speech took place in a cavernous meeting hall, literally steps away from where ballot counters tallied votes from the 2020 presidential election. As the counting proceeded, Trump supporters came to the hall and staged angry protests, making unfounded accusations of ballot fraud.
Federal prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment against Trump, accusing him of conspiring to overturn a valid election, claims 2020 campaign officials encouraged those protests. Trump’s current campaign team has said those accusations are false.
But neither Trump nor his supporters are anywhere close to acknowledging that the 2020 election was legitimately won by Joe Biden.
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Before Trump took the stage, as supporters were filing in and taking their seats, giant screens played a pair of campaign videos: one urging supporters to “swamp” the election with their votes because Democrats would supposedly try to steal the election, another railing against the supposed injustice of the criminal prosecutions against him.
The vibe overall was a bit mild by the standards of Trump rallies, with none of the festival atmosphere that frequently accompanies his appearances.
The crowd appeared to number in the low thousands, though official estimates were not immediately available. It was also overwhelmingly white, in a city where roughly three-quarters of the population is Black.
There was plenty of standing room in the back, plus empty chairs scattered throughout. Prior to the speech, campaign workers were offering people in the back a chance to sit on the risers behind the stage.
The event was also Trump’s final stop on a full day of campaigning, including a visit to the heavily Arab American city of Hamtramck and a town-hall-style event in the northern suburbs of Detroit.