Former President Donald Trump crisscrossed the battleground state of Michigan on Friday, casting himself as an economic protectionist to blue-collar voters while attacking Vice President Kamala Harris over immigration on the same day she visited the southern border.
Trump used a pair of events to try to blame Harris for inflation and the migrant crisis, tapping into some of the populist themes that helped him win Michigan — and the presidency — in the 2016 election. In 2020, the state flipped for President Joe Biden.
In the afternoon, the former president visited a manufacturing facility near Grand Rapids before holding a town hall event in the Detroit suburbs that started about 90 minutes late and ended after just a half-hour.
At the second event, in Warren, Trump vowed, if Congress did not act, to use executive action to enact protective tariffs to limit the flow of imports from China and other countries that he said were killing jobs in the state.
“The word ‘tariff’ I love,” he said at Macomb Community College, where he was joined onstage by Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., one of his staunchest allies in the Senate who served as the town hall’s moderator.
Trump fielded a handful of friendly questions from his supporters that set up familiar talking points and lines of attack. He said Americans were forgoing certain comforts because they could no longer afford them under the Biden-Harris administration.
“We don’t order bacon anymore,” he said. “It’s too expensive.”
Macomb County, a working-class area north of Detroit, backed Trump in 2016 and 2020. His visit to Michigan came one day after voters in the state began receiving absentee ballots.
Harris met with Border Patrol agents on Friday in Douglas, Arizona, her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border since she became the Democratic presidential nominee.
Hours earlier at his first Michigan event in Walker, Trump went on a 25-minute-long diatribe about the Biden administration’s immigration policy. Trump, who was convicted of 34 felony counts in New York City and whose 2020 election lies spurred an attack on the Capitol, called Harris’ border policy a “crime,” saying “there’s no greater act of disloyalty than to extinguish the sovereignty of your own nation.”
Trump once again broadly depicted immigrants as “killers” bent on invading the United States, a characterization that border authorities have said ignores that many migrants are families with children. He pointed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data reported earlier Friday by Fox News that found 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on the agency’s national docket.
But the data does not bear out many of Trump’s claims about immigration, including his insistence that immigrants living in the country illegally are causing a crime spike in the United States, a contention that available national data does not support.
And at one point, Trump acknowledged that he has made some of his immigration claims — including his continued insistence that other countries are deliberately sending prisoners and the mentally ill across the southern border — without evidence, then maintained that he had not needed it anyway.
“They’re dumping them in our country, and I never had proof,” Trump told hundreds of people at a manufacturer in Walker. He added: “You know why? It’s common sense.”
Trump’s advisers have been eager to get him to focus on policy, particularly around immigration and the economy, two areas where polling has shown dissatisfaction with Democrats.
As he often does in Michigan, he singled out autoworkers and the auto industry, which have long been central to the state’s economy. He criticized Harris’ tax plans and once again promised to impose a tariff of 100% or more on every car coming across the Mexican border, a proposal that could potentially violate the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement negotiated by his administration.
As he was talking about his proposed tax cuts, he stopped briefly to acknowledge people leaving his event before he was finished, falsely insisting that people do not leave his rallies early and that “when they do, I finish up quick.”
At their debate, Harris rankled Trump when she suggested people were leaving his events early because they were bored and exhausted. On Friday, Trump told the crowd that those leaving early were headed backstage to take photos. Some of them probably were doing so, but the crowd behind the press riser had already thinned out well before he made that remark.
In a sign of Michigan’s importance, Harris stated Trump’s visit in which she criticized him for favoring corporations over their workers and for failing to deliver on his promises about manufacturing while he was president.
Arguing that Trump’s trade deal cleared the way for companies to outsource jobs to Mexico, Harris said, “We’ve seen this movie before. Once again, he is repeating the same playbook and telling the same old lies about how he’ll fight for working people, including those in Michigan.”
According to New York Times polling averages in the state, Harris and Trump remain in a tight race in Michigan. Still, Harris has held a narrow edge over the past month, and her replacing Biden on the Democratic ticket significantly cut into a lead that Trump seemed to hold for months.
At his town hall, Trump sat near a prop: a 1967 Chevrolet Camaro. He was asked by one of his supporters what was one of his favorite American-made cars. His answer: Cadillac. He said that his late father, Fred, would buy a dark blue Cadillac every two years.
“I buy a lot of them for different clubs and things,” Trump said of Cadillacs, adding, “Great question.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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