In Detroit, Trump almost apologizes for denigrating the city

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DETROIT – Donald Trump is unapologetic. Always. It’s actually something he’s very proud of.

But his return to Michigan on Friday showed he understood, at least briefly, that he had fallen into crisis last week in a city that could determine the fate of that state’s 15 electoral votes. Or at least he was willing to feign something like remorse for insulting Detroit during a visit to the Detroit Economic Club and make his point clear. With Trump you can never really see the intensity of performance art.

On stage Friday night as “Make Detroit Great Again” played on the screen, Trump said the city’s problems were failures made under Democrats’ watch. “Your beautiful place, your beautiful city” was “decimated as if by a foreign army.” It was a large portion of victimhood with the promise of redemption

“I’m going to put Detroit first. I will put Michigan first. I will put America first,” he said.

It was something of an about-face after Trump warned Vice President Kamala Harris last week: “Our whole country is going to end up like Detroit if she’s your president. “You’re going to have a mess on your hands.” It was like go to Orlando and say Mickey Mouse is a communist.

The audience’s acceptance of Trump’s Detroit-on-the-rise ploy was consistent with their collective amnesia, or indifference, to his logical inconsistencies throughout the evening. After promising to eliminate all regulations on electric vehicles, he praised Tesla boss Elon Musk. His contradictions on tariffs were as obvious as ever. Trump’s complex and inconsistent worldview seemed to undermine the controversy he had over his event at a downtown venue whose history included figure skater Tonya Harding’s crushing of rival Nancy Kerrigan en route to the 1994 Olympics. not to be shaken.

(That was, of course, when the ex-president’s microphone wasn’t out. For this long period, the candidate paced up and down the stage while “Technical Difficulties, Complicated Business” was projected on the screens. Trump joked, he would stiffen that up again “This is the worst microphone I’ve ever had.”

Trump’s response to an inelegant remark came after Harris’ campaign spent days making the remark the focus of her argument against Michigan voters for considering Trump a candidate in the first place. It seemed as untypical as it was rarely pragmatic.

Nothing about the original snipe was surprising or subtle. The ex-president has always resorted to malice and malice in pushing his arguments. Since he is a bully through and through, there is little reason to believe he would finally abandon the schtick in what is widely considered to be his final campaign. Even when he was out voting in Detroit last week, he found a way to insult her while sitting in her womb.

But false remorse Was a little shock. The original excavation had few tangible consequences. FiveThirtyEight’s moving average of Michigan polls had Trump at 47% in Michigan when he expressed the insult. When he took the stage a week later in Detroit – a city that has often been defensive and defiant in the past – he held the same position in the polls.

Still, Trump is by no means a guarantee that he will be on the winning list in just a few weeks. Michigan could break the Democrats’ critical blue wall, which is why both campaigns have booked so many events and rallies there in recent weeks and have even more planned in the coming days. Internal discussions clearly suggested that the insult to Detroit was less a snuffed out candle than a simmering risk too great to ignore.

Before the boss spoke, Trump political adviser Stephen Miller caused a stir by promising a plan to make Detroit the “economic center of the world,” as if the opposite hadn’t been suggested just days earlier. It was a signal that Trump’s withdrawal was not a deviation from the script but a change to it. Trump peppered his remarks with rare notes of optimism, even as his somber rhetoric on other issues showed no signs of abating.

“If you vote for Trump, there will be a mass exodus of manufacturing jobs from Mexico to Michigan,” he promised, pointing to a mysterious Chinese manufacturing operation that could move north if Trump wins next month.

Perhaps Trump could have survived criticism for last week’s comment, at least if his technique was acceptable. Historically, when he messes up, he only reinforces Harris’s corresponding—albeit disparate—perceived failings. Like a Teflon-coated sheet, Trump successfully navigated his way through the thorny 2016 primary. He drew a lot of good fortune from Hillary Clinton’s misfortune. And he didn’t even acknowledge his main opponents in 2024, instead hurling insults from afar if anyone dared to come an inch closer to him. And despite a surge for Harris after she replaced Joe Biden on the ticket, the race remained stable and undecided.

A stable race was in order in the summer. When crowds arrive with heavy jackets, the stable stops working.

“I’ve been reading about Detroit for so long, the comeback,” Trump said Friday evening to a crowd, many of whom had been on their feet for hours and had become visibly restless even before his arrival. “This is the real comeback.”

Trump was ostensibly talking about the economy, but it was entirely reasonable to include his own polls in that optimism.

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