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Former President Donald Trump gave a combative campaign speech Saturday night in a hangar at the Oakland County Airport, rebuking the judge who fined him about $450 million a day earlier for financial fraud and echoing his own criticisms. He lashed out at the judiciary, which he said was a corrupt and corrupt system. He opposed him for political reasons.
“Horrible, terrible things are happening,” Trump said as his speech began in Waterford shortly after 7pm. “We’re talking about democracy. This is a terrible threat to democracy that’s happening.” he said.
In a more than hour-long speech in which Trump brought autoworkers to the stage, the former president listed a series of grievances against President Joe Biden and the current administration, blaming them for open borders and crime. He said violent crime fell across the country last year, but he is the only one who can stop efforts to secure borders, forge trade deals and force automakers to promote electric vehicles.
Trump, who gave the speech 10 days before Michigan’s Republican primary on February 27, talked about how important the state will be if he wins the nomination to run against Biden in the fall, as expected. He was under no illusions, saying, “If we win Michigan, we win Michigan.” election. “
He might be right.
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Wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat, Trump opened his speech with a full-throated attack on his business practices and claims that Democrats are trying to capture him and prevent him from being elected president again. I started defending it. “These are Democrats who absolutely hate me. They hate you, too,” he told thousands of supporters gathered at a hangar in Waterford Township, northwest of Detroit. Told.
Trump’s visit to the state he won in 2016 and decisively lost to President Joe Biden in 2020 comes at a difficult legal time for the former president. A day earlier, New York Judge Arthur Engoron fined Trump more than $450 million with interest and banned him from doing business in the state for three years for illegally inflating his financial reports. did. Earlier this week, another New York judge ruled that Mr. Trump’s criminal case, related to hush money paid to an adult film actress ahead of the 2016 election, was a serious threat to Mr. Trump as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination. Despite this, the court ruled that the case could proceed in March.
President Trump is expected to appeal Friday’s findings, which would likely require him to post a hefty bail, especially since just three weeks ago Trump filed a civil defamation lawsuit stemming from the incident. His financial exposure has been enormous since he was sentenced to $83.3 million in fines. Author E. Jean Carroll publicly denied sexual assault allegations after a civil jury ruled in her favor.
He continues to denounce these lawsuits as well as others. These include a case in Georgia related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, a case related to the same issue before a federal judge in Washington, D.C., and a third in Florida. , including incidents related to suspicions that he wrongfully maintained. After he leaves office, his classified documents are treated as worthless and politically motivated.
During Saturday’s speech, he repeatedly returned to legal challenges to defend himself, blaming his claims on an unfair legal system manipulated by Democrats.
He also called Engoron “crooked” and “a lunatic” earlier in his speech. “Hopefully everything will be thrown out and reversed,” he said.
Trump’s supporters generally agree with his arguments regarding the case against him. Trump has only solidified his support for the Republican Party, despite facing legal challenges and efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to Biden. Even if they don’t show any evidence. He claimed there was widespread fraud in the results. He is widely expected to win Michigan’s Republican primary on Feb. 27 and follow-up conventions like the Republican caucus next weekend. His only opponent at the moment is former United Nations ambassador and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.
But legal issues could hurt independent voters, and if he were to become president again, he would no longer have the power to pardon himself in non-federal matters, such as the New York case.
President Trump headed to Michigan in subzero temperatures as enthusiastic crowds stood outside hoping to see him. Earlier in the day, he took an unusual detour for a former president on the campaign trail by pushing out $399 gold lamé Trump-branded sneakers at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia.
There, he was booed, according to the Associated Press.
But in the Waterford area, he was greeted with a standing ovation and cheers for his argument that the switch to selling electric cars and EVs would lead to fewer car-related jobs. This assertion is true, although efforts are underway to shift lost jobs to related fields. Manufacturing industry. Meanwhile, his claim that all auto workers “will be out of work within two years” as Chinese manufacturers take over the EV market is wild speculation. China controls much of the supply chain for EV battery materials, and billions of dollars are being invested in it. The United States is opening new factories and creating new supply chains for domestic production, largely due to incentives created by the Biden administration.
He also claimed that China currently manufactures cars in Mexico and sells them to the United States “duty-free,” although Chinese companies are building factories in Mexico, a claim that is not true.
Trump cited the huge number of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border and said the border was much safer when he was president, which he blames for the spike in crime. He brought up the image of “illegal alien criminals crawling through windows and breaking into drawers.”
Since he resigned as president, he again made baseless claims of fraud after the election, saying the people had become “stupid” again and said he would reverse the situation if re-elected.
“We will no longer be a stupid nation,” he said. “We did well and built the greatest economy in the history of this country, and we will get it back and do it again.”
President Trump certainly oversaw a strong economy, especially in terms of rising stock markets, but the government shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic caused the economy to deteriorate in the second half of his term. Mr. Biden has also overseen strong gains in the stock and job markets as unemployment remains low, but those gains have only sharply declined in recent months as inflation worsened in the wake of the pandemic.
Before the speech, Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Bruce Township) said she expected President Trump to tell the audience “how we’re going to get our country back on track.”
Mr. Trump’s speech also comes at a time of factional strife within the state’s Republican Party, with the Republican National Committee (RNC) last week announcing that former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, who was Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands, would officially become a state Republican. The party decided. She became president after last month’s election, even though Cristina Karamo, elected in 2023, continues to insist that her election and her removal from office were invalid.
“It’s time for us to come together,” McClain said after the RNC endorsed Hoekstra, adding, “We need to understand who our enemy is.” But despite President Trump’s multiple references to Hoekstra during his speech, Karamo’s supporters said that Karamo remained the chairman and that on Saturday, a group of state board members were scheduled to attend that day’s meeting. claimed to have re-elected her.
The courts will ultimately rule on the issue, which will be decided by the Republican presidential primary on February 27th and two days later, on March 2nd, when candidates will be given nominated delegates. A final decision must be made by the state Republican Party that will hold the awarding convention.
On Friday, the Michigan Democratic Party held a virtual press conference to condemn President Trump and warn that his victory in November would be bad news for Michigan, its workers and the country. Rep. Debbie Dingell, an Ann Arbor Democrat, said that when she warned of a possible Trump victory in 2016, many in her party ignored her concerns.
“I’m really scared to death of what’s going to happen in this country this time,” Dingell said. Trump “doesn’t care about our auto industry. He doesn’t care about working people,” she said.
Ahead of President Trump’s rally, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign, released a statement saying President Trump stands against workers, fights to overturn abortion access, and allows jobs to be moved offshore. claimed to have done so. “While Donald Trump has created division everywhere he goes, we have come together to make our state more welcoming and more prosperous,” she said. “Michigan wasn’t buying what Donald Trump was selling in 2020, and we won’t be buying it in 2024.”
But while Trump won Michigan in 2016, he received fewer than 11,000 votes, or about two-tenths of a percentage point. And voters widely disapprove of Biden’s performance as president, with polls showing him trailing Trump in several battleground states, including Michigan. , there are many signs that he could win the state again this year.
A Fox News poll this week showed Trump leading Biden by two points in the head-to-head race in Michigan, 47% to 45%, but that was within the poll’s margin of error. Trump’s lead was even larger, 42% to 37%, when independent candidates Robert Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West and Green Party candidate Jill Stein were included.
Complicating matters for Biden in Michigan is his support for Israel in its response to Hamas in the Gaza Strip following the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks of last year. The counterattack killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, including many progressives as well as members of the southeast. Michigan’s large Arab-American and Muslim communities are calling on Mr. Biden for a ceasefire in light of the financial aid the United States is providing to Israel.
Biden, who made his first campaign trip of the year earlier this month, has received support in the state, including some who endorsed his candidacy in January and held an event on his behalf in Warren. This includes the UAW that hosted the event. UAW Chairman Sean Fein, fresh off a successful strike at the Detroit Three automakers, said Biden was the first sitting president to walk the picket line, but called Trump a “scab” and a member of the “billionaire class.” He loudly criticized it.
Meanwhile, President Trump has criticized Fein as a “drug” and a “weapon of mass destruction,” and has insisted that automakers will be allowed to move forward with the transition to expanding sales of electric vehicles and that he will not oppose rules proposed by the Biden administration. He fought back violently. To promote these sales, UAW executives could take jobs away from autoworkers.
At the same time, the Biden campaign is not slowing down as it looks to shore up its support base in Michigan ahead of the Feb. 27 primary, which Trump is widely expected to win. On Friday, the company released a one-minute television commercial that aired in Michigan and other battleground states, featuring comments that President Trump allegedly made to leaders of NATO member nations, the North American Treaty Organization. criticized. If he did not pay some of the group’s expenses, he intended to encourage Russia to take whatever action it desired.
“No president has ever said something like that,” the ad says. “It’s embarrassing.”
Contact Todd Spangler at tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @tsspangler. Staff writer Phoebe Wall Howard contributed to this story.
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