Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019s campaign and Democrats are seizing on recent comments made by former president Donald Trump in which he insulted Detroit, compared the largest city in the battleground state of Michigan to a \u201cdeveloping nation\u201d and downplayed the skills required for autoworkers to do their jobs.<\/p>\n
Trump first bashed the Motor City during a meandering speech before the Detroit Economic Club last week, warning that the United States would \u201cend up\u201d like Detroit if Harris wins election in November.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole country is going to be like \u2014 you want to know the truth? \u2014 it\u2019ll be like Detroit,\u201d Trump said. \u201cOur whole country will end up being like Detroit if she\u2019s your president. You\u2019re going to have a mess on your hands.\u201d<\/p>\n
Days later, Trump again knocked the city in an interview with Bloomberg News hosted by the Economic Club of Chicago, calling Detroit \u201cjust horrible\u201d and saying that \u201cit\u2019s never come back.\u201d In the same interview, he also suggested children could do the same job as auto manufacturing workers, a huge part of Detroit\u2019s industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t build cars. They take them out of a box and they assemble them. We could have our child do it,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
\u201cTake a look at Detroit. Take a look at our cities. We\u2019re a developing nation,\u201d he said later in the interview when asked about competition between the United States and China.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s comments targeting a city that has prided itself on its resurgence prompted immediate backlash from local and state leaders. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan (D) defended the city as a \u201cbeacon of progress.\u201d State Rep. Tyrone Carter (D) told the Detroit Free Press there were \u201cracial overtones or undertones\u201d in Trump\u2019s decision to attack Detroit, which has a majority-Black population.<\/p>\n
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), a co-chair of the Harris campaign, suggested to Trump last week that he \u201ckeep Detroit out of your mouth.\u201d On Wednesday, Whitmer posted another message to her social media accounts, calling Trump out for his record on auto manufacturing and saying he would \u201cnever understand\u201d what is great about Detroit.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, Detroit\u2019s on the rise: factories getting built, new housing going up, and middle-class jobs being created. America would be so lucky to end up like us,\u201d Whitmer said. \u201cDetroit represents everything that Donald Trump isn\u2019t: We\u2019re tough, we have each other\u2019s backs, and we will keep growing our city and making it a great place to live, work and invest.\u201d<\/p>\n
As President, Donald Trump failed Detroit. Now he has the audacity to talk smack about our city, again. pic.twitter.com\/jZWFq1uS4q<\/p>\n
\u2014 Gretchen Whitmer (@gretchenwhitmer) October 16, 2024<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Last Thursday, Harris responded to Trump\u2019s comments while on the campaign trail in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy opponent, Donald Trump, yet again has trashed another great American city when he was in Detroit, which is just a further piece of evidence on a very long list of why he is unfit to be president of the United States,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The next day, the Harris campaign had already cut a new ad, \u201cLike Detroit,\u201d that touted residents as \u201cwinners\u201d and \u201cup-and-comers\u201d who had rebuilt the city, despite many proclamations that Detroit was \u201cdead.\u201d<\/p>\n
NEW AD: Yesterday Donald Trump attacked Detroit while in Detroit.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump doesn\u2019t understand a damn thing about Detroit. pic.twitter.com\/ANP7aiaVvW<\/p>\n
\u2014 Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 11, 2024<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
A representative for the Trump campaign defended the former president\u2019s comments about Detroit, noting that the city\u2019s population has dropped more than 60 percent since 1960 and that its homicide rate is among the highest in the nation.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike many Americans, President Trump remembers when Detroit was lauded as the gold standard for auto manufacturing success and revolutionized the industry,\u201d Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for the Trump\u2019s campaign Michigan operations, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s \u201cpolicies will usher in a new era of economic success and stability for Detroit, helping the city reach its fullest potential,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Harris\u2019s campaign has since pushed out several more clips from Trump\u2019s interviews bashing Detroit, and the Democratic presidential nominee herself visited the city earlier this week. On Monday, she stopped by a Black-owned art gallery for a talk about entrepreneurship, joined by actors Don Cheadle and Delroy Lindo, as well as actor Cornelius Smith Jr., a Detroit native. On Tuesday, Harris sat down for an interview with \u201cThe Breakfast Club\u201d co-host Charlamagne tha God.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s comments about a majority-Black city \u2014 and the Harris campaign\u2019s rapid response \u2014 come as both candidates have been trying to rally the support of Black male voters and as early voting is already underway in Michigan. Detroit has one of the highest rates of absentee ballot returns in the state, and as of Wednesday, more than 50,000 of the city\u2019s approximately 101,000 absentee ballots sent had already been returned, according to the Michigan secretary of state\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
One Democratic operative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the state of the race, called Trump\u2019s decision to slam Michigan\u2019s largest city \u201ca gift.\u201d Trump won the critical battleground state by less than half a percentage point in 2016, and Joe Biden won Michigan by nearly three percentage points in 2020.<\/p>\n
It is not the first time Trump has insulted a large city in a crucial battleground state. Over the summer, Democrats also capitalized on a report \u2014 denied by Trump \u2014 that he described Milwaukee as a \u201chorrible city\u201d during a meeting with House Republicans on Capitol Hill that was closed to the media. The city, the largest in Wisconsin, hosted the Republican National Convention about a month later.<\/p>\n
Trump also targeted other large cities as president. While in office, he called Baltimore a \u201crodent-infested mess\u201d and Atlanta \u201cfalling apart\u201d and \u201ccrime-infested.\u201d On the campaign trail, Trump has baselessly accused Harris of having \u201cdestroyed\u201d both San Francisco and the state of California when she served as the city\u2019s district attorney and the state\u2019s attorney general.<\/p>\n
Maeve Reston contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019s campaign and Democrats are seizing on recent comments made by former president Donald Trump in which he insulted Detroit, compared the largest city in the battleground state of Michigan to a \u201cdeveloping nation\u201d and downplayed the skills required for autoworkers to do their jobs. Trump first bashed the Motor City during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11266,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}