Maladroit in Detroit: Trump trashes MoTown in weird Michigan gambit – Times of India

WASHINGTON: MAGA megaphone Donald Trump‘s maverick campaign style came to the fore again on Thursday when he dumped on Detroit while speaking to the Detroit Economic Club, warning that the famed motor city will be doomed if Kamala Harris becomes president.
In fact, he went further. “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands,” Trump said in the largest city in Michigan, a battleground state that is crucial to his White House prospect.
Polls show him tied within the margin of error in Michigan, and disquiet over Democrats’ stand on the middle-east among the state’s 300,000 Arab-American community centering around nearby Dearborn was thought to give Trump a chance to win. Some analysts think he may have blown it, with one political operative saying it is like someone “calling us ugly and then asking us out on a date.”
Detroiters did not take kindly to the slight. “I represent Detroit in Congress. Detroit is a city with a booming economy, diverse culture, and some of the best people in America,” snapped back Shri Thanedar, the Indian-American Congressman from the 13th Congressional district that includes Detroit, asking Trump to “keep Detroit and our people out of your mouth.”
“This is the greatest city in the country & we’ve bounced back after Trump killed our jobs, closed our businesses, & tried to throw out our votes. #Detroit threw Trump out of the White House last time and we’ll do it again,” the state’s House Speaker Joe Tate said. Kamala Harris too pitched in, saying Trump’s trashing of another great American city a “further evidence on a very long list of why he is unfit to be president.”
But such bluntspeak is part of Trump’s campaign shtick, one that includes painting much of urban America as a dystopian hellscape that only he can rescue. He has said this about San Francisco, New York, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, among other cities, and even further, called the US “a stupid country run by stupid people.” All the cities have large black and minority populations.
Trump put-down of Detroit came when he was pledging to restore its once famed reputation as the center of automobile world. While the so-called Motown has lost much of its mojo with automobile production moving across the border to Canada and Mexico, and further afield to China and India, the city has been bouncing back in recent years, reporting the first increase in population in decades this year as manufacturing trickles back.
In another rambling speech that lasted almost two hours, Trump also griped about Barack Obama getting a Nobel Peace Prize and he not getting one, and boasted about getting Michigan’s Man of the Year award some 20 years ago, berating the media for questioning his claim by pulling out a paper clipping from a local newspaper that showed an even more minor award given by the local unit of the Republican Party.
Trump though threw out more financial largesse aimed at winning votes, pledging to make interest on car loans fully tax deductible.