Donald Trump To Detroit: Drop Dead
But how will it play in Peoria?
Donald Trump gave a campaign speech at the Detroit Economic Club Thursday, and as has become the norm for the least normal candidate ever, the Great Leader rambled incoherently for nearly two hours, flitted from one topic to another with no apparent logic, and lied, lied, lied. We think it might have been billed as a speech on his economic policy, which is China, tariffs, immigrant murderers, inflation, immigrant rapists, voter fraud, immigrants with big knives coming to kill you and eat your pets while taking all the hurricane money and also did he mention China, and immigrants.
But there we go, falling into that old journalistic trap of making Trump sound more coherent than he was.
TV news station website Click On Detroit sanewashed it by saying Trump “spoke for more than an hour, covering a wide range of topics, including the automotive industry and manufacturing.”
The Detroit News helpfully explained that Trump “pitched Michigan business leaders Thursday on a series of steps he hopes can reinvigorate what he says is a ‘collapsing’ U.S. auto industry, while also criticizing Detroit, the city where he was delivering his remarks.”
Well OK, if you say so. You sure that’s what he did?
Here’s video of the full speech, for anyone with more patience than we have; we started skipping ahead during the initial two-plus minutes when Trump smiled and swayed as “God Bless the USA” played.
Trump had a teleprompter, for all the good it did. After some ritual lies about Hurricane Helene, Trump exaggerated Thursday’s inflation report, saying that it DOUBLED economists’ predictions. His speechwriters must have been so proud: The monthly rate was up two tenths of a percent instead of the one-tenth in the forecast. But the annualized rate was up just 2.4 percent from this time last year (compared to a 2.3 percent forecast). Aren’t numbers fun?
And then I remembered that fact-checking a two hour Trump speech would take days, so here, have a few WTF moments.
Per the Detroit News, the “plan” to boost the auto industry involved tariffs on imported vehicles, duh, as well as yet another made-up tax exemption, this time a promise to make interest on car loans fully deductible. We guess that was in there.
Trump also brought that sense of sunny, can-do optimism that audiences have come to know and love, proclaiming “Your car industry is going out of business. It's going out of business,” but just elect him and everything will be fine again.
But if Harris wins, Trump warned, then all of America “will be like Detroit. Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.” Like Detroit? Gosh, what ever could he have been talking about?
Detroit Free Press columnist Khalil AlHajal points out that despite the friendly crowd, the joke fell flat. While they laughed at his other punchlines, they stayed silent when he insulted the majority-Black city he was standing in. And Detroit’s doing pretty well, thanks, Mayor Mike Duggan pointed out, what with crime down, population increasing, and new industries booming.
In fact, AlHajal adds,
Detroit actually did inspire a part of Harris' economic plan. Harris announced in August a proposal to provide up to $25,000 in down payment assistance to first-time home buyers.
We’re already doing that. Detroit’s program served as a model for the national initiative, according to Duggan.
It’s almost as if everything Trump thinks he knows is forever trapped in the 1980s.
Also, here’s a fun thing: One of Trump’s oldest and favoritest lies since at least 2016 is that he received a “Michigan Man of the Year” award in 2013, although no such award exists. In his Detroit speech, Trump bristled at being called a liar by New York Times reporter Peter Baker, the latest reporter to fact check the story. Trump dramatically pulled from his suit pocket a printout of a newspaper story he said proved that the award was real, and that he DID TOO get the award. He even worked in a joke about Kamala Harris working at McDonalds, which Trumpers think never happened.
Thus did Trump destroy the failing New York Times, because there was an article about the award! Except nah, it was a 2023 article from the Oakland (Michigan) Press about Trump being honored by local Republicans as “Man of the Decade,” a real upgrade. The article did say Trump had been awarded “Man of the Year” a decade earlier, so he still wins!!!
Except nah again, because the 2023 article was wrong, an error the editors apologized for in a correction published after Trump repeated the lie in his speech: “Trump was the keynote speaker at the 2013 dinner in Novi, which drew a record crowd. He was not honored as Man of the Year.” Oops.
There was even more dogshit in the speech, like when Trump decided he needed to define “groceries.”
“The word grocery — it’s a sort of simple word. It sort of means like everything you eat. The stomach is speaking, it always does. And I have more complaints about that, bacon, things going up. Double, triple, quadruple.”
Very stable economic policy expert, he’s the guy.
Following the speech, Trump sat down to take a few friendly questions from GOP fucktondonor John Rakolta, who may sound familiar. A decade ago, Rakolta was among several rich assholes who pushed a crazy scheme to turn Detroit’s Belle Isle, a huge, historic public park on an island in the river separating Detroit from its neighbor to the south, Canada, into an independent nation, a libertarian paradise with no taxes or regulations. That never happened.
But he’s more likely to sound familiar because his wife, Terry Rakolta, tried to get “Married With Children” taken off the air back in the ‘80s. That also never happened.
Rakolta wanted to know how Trump raised such wonderful successful children, and for some reason Trump didn’t use the big word nepotism because it’s not in his vocabulary. Instead, Trump went off on an eight-minute rant that eventually ended up calling for the death penalty for drug dealers, which we doubt would actually help with the Terrible Twos.
Also, we have previously discussed Donald Trump’s sociopathic parenting, so fuck him.
Oh, also, it sure sounds like Trump farted during the speech, too. At about the 4-second mark here:
After you listen to that a few dozen times, please remember for Crom’s sake to turn down your speakers again so you won’t be blasted by the next audio thing you play.
[Detroit News / Detroit Free Press / New Republic / FactCheck.Org. / AlterNet]
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"Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president."
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I think I'm gonna peace out for the rest of the day. I am seriously having an anxiety attack about PAB regaining office and killing the country. I was crying at nothing yesterday and I'm doing it again today. Everyone be kind to each other and if you can't, then be silent. We need to stick together.