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DETROIT—President Donald Trump has not apologized. Until now. In fact, it is a matter of great pride for him.
But by returning to Michigan on Friday, he understood, at least temporarily, that last week he had stepped into a city that could decide the fate of the state’s 15 electors. was shown. Or at least he intended to make his position clear with a feigned near-repentance for insulting Detroit during his visit to the Detroit Economic Club. In Trump’s case, you can’t really convey the intensity of performance art.
On Friday night, as the message “Make Detroit Great Again” played on the screen, President Trump took to the stage and said the city’s problems were a failure on Democratic Party watch. “Your beautiful place, your beautiful city” is “as if it were destroyed by a foreign army.” It was a heaping sense of victimhood with a promise of redemption.
“I’ll put Detroit first. I’ll put Michigan first. I’ll put America first.”
There was something of a reversal last week after President Trump warned Vice President Kamala Harris that “if she were president, our entire country would end up like Detroit.” It was the expression. You’re going to mess up your hands.” It was like going to Orlando and saying Mickey Mouse is a communist.
The audience’s acceptance of Trump’s increasingly popular spin on Detroit was matched throughout the night by a collective amnesia or indifference to Trump’s logical contradictions. After pledging to end the electric vehicle mandate, he paused to praise Tesla CEO Elon Musk. His contradictions on tariffs remained evident. President Trump’s complex and inconsistent worldview is evident in his response to his event at the downtown event space where figure skater Tonya Harding pinned rival Nancy Kerrigan to her knees on the way to the 1994 Olympics. It didn’t seem to shake the confusion.
(That was, of course, when the former president’s microphone wouldn’t turn off. For that long, the candidate paced around the stage as “technical difficulties, complex business” were shown on the screen.) Mr. Trump spoke again. “That’s the worst microphone I’ve ever had. In a unionized worker town, it was a joke that might not be funny to everyone.”
The walkback over Trump’s vulgar comments comes after days in which Harris’ campaign centered on appealing to Michigan voters who still consider Trump the candidate. It seemed too unrealistic and out of character.
There was nothing surprising or subtle about the original Sandpiper. Former presidents have always used meanness and meanness to make their points. A bully at heart, there’s little reason to think he’ll finally shake off his abuse on the march toward his final and widely publicized campaign. Even as he appealed for the vote in Detroit last week, he found a way to insult the vote while sitting on his stomach.
However, this false repentance was a bit of a shock. Initial excavations yielded little visible results. A moving average of Michigan polls by FiveThirtyEight showed Trump’s approval rating in Michigan at 47% at the time he leveled the insult. When he took to the stage a week later in Detroit, a city with a history of defensiveness and defiance, he held the same position in the polls.
But there’s no guarantee that Trump will have a winning map in just a few weeks. Michigan could break through a key Democratic blue wall. That is why both sides have booked so many events and rallies in recent weeks, with many more scheduled in the coming days. Apparently, internal discussions suggested that the insult to Detroit was not like a snuffed out candle, but a smoldering risk that could not be ignored.
Before the president spoke, Trump’s policy adviser Stephen Miller promised plans to make Detroit the “economic capital of the world,” as if the opposite hadn’t been hinted at just days earlier. It caused an uproar. It was a signal that President Trump’s feathering was a script change, not a departure from the script. President Trump peppered his remarks with rare overtones of optimism, even as his gloomy rhetoric on other topics showed no signs of softening.
“If we vote for Trump, we’re going to see a huge exodus of manufacturing jobs from Mexico to Michigan,” he promised, adding that if Trump wins next month, the mysterious China could move north. cited the manufacturing industry.
Perhaps Mr. Trump could have weathered the criticism for his comments last week, at least if his technique was satisfactory. Historically, when he fails, he only amplifies the perceived flaws that Harris corresponds to, if not equals. Trump zigzagged his way through the difficult 2016 primaries like a Teflon-coated sheet. He was the source of all the good fortune in Hillary Clinton’s misfortune. And he didn’t even have the courage to recognize the main antagonist of 2024, hurling insults from afar at anyone who dared to approach him. And even though Harris surged after she replaced Joe Biden at the top, the race remained stable and tied.
I’m glad I was able to run consistent races this summer. The stables cease to function as crowds in heavy jackets begin to arrive.
“I’ve been reading about the resurgence of Detroit,” President Trump told the audience Friday night. Many in the audience had been standing for hours and were clearly restless even before we arrived. “This is a real comeback.”
Trump was ostensibly talking about the economy, but it was perfectly reasonable to project his own polling into that optimistic view.
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