Just as he did four years ago before an unexpected victory propelled him to the White House, President Donald Trump ended his reelection campaign with an early morning speech in Grand Rapids Tuesday, predicting a win in Michigan while issuing the direst of warnings about what could happen if he is defeated.
Despite evidence to the contrary, Trump, concluding a four-state swing at a speech that began at midnight at Gerald R. Ford International Airport before a crowd of thousands, claimed that Democratic rival Joe Biden would work to take away private insurance, confiscate guns and “indoctrinate your children with hateful un-American lies.”
“I was elected to fight for you and I’ve fought for you harder than anyone has ever fought before,” Trump said during the hour-and-15-minute speech before returning to Washington, D.C. to await results. “Do you want to be represented by a politician who hates you?”
The speech by turns showed Trump being confident and snarky about his chances before issuing dark warnings, despite there being no evidence Biden, the former vice president, would take any of the drastic steps Trump outlined. It was reminiscent of the raucous final speech of the 2016 campaign, which Trump gave to a large crowd at the DeVos Place Convention Center in Grand Rapids four years ago.
Like then, he went into Tuesday’s election needing to overcome polls that showed him trailing Biden in Michigan and several other battleground states, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, two of the three other states he visited Monday in a last-minute campaign blitz. Unlike 2016, however, Trump had a somewhat larger deficit: The latest Free Press poll last week showed him trailing Biden 48%-41%.
But ending a day that began Monday morning in North Carolina, Trump predicted victory, insisting the polls are wrong, though he joked that he’d like to see “a little more margin” than last time, when he won the state by 10,704 votes, or about two-tenths of 1%. Even so, he suggested he was poised to “win the state so easily” because he had lived up to promises made during the 2016 campaign.
Some of those promises — such as forcing a rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), fighting China on trade and cracking down on immigration along the southern border — Trump has clearly followed through on, and, at least until just before the coronavirus pandemic began in March, the economy had been doing well.
But as was the case in all of the recent speeches Trump has given in Michigan, including one he gave earlier in the evening in Traverse City, this one was rife with blatant inaccuracies and misrepresentations, only more so.
More:Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 on remaking Michigan manufacturing. Did he deliver?
For instance, he repeated a claim that some 17 car plants had been built, though the Free Press knows of only two being announced during Trump’s tenure in office. He also again suggested that Japan was building five new plants in the state, though no such announcement has been made. Given that fact, it made for an even stranger moment when he later joked, “You better get out there and vote. (Or) I’ll be so angry, I’ll never come back… I’ll tell Japan to take all those plants back.”
At another moment in the speech, he suggested that the auto industry has never been stronger, even though, in the last quarter, sales were still well below what they were in the same quarter last year, though they were up from the second quarter of this year, when the pandemic was at its height.
Trump continues to misrepresent lockdowns, Michigan award
The president also continued to repeat stories about having won a Man of the Year award 12 years ago in Michigan, for which there is no evidence, and he claimed again, inaccurately, that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had strict lockdown orders in place.
“You’re not allowed to leave your house or your apartment,… they’re doing that for political reasons,” he said, despite the fact that there were thousands of people clearly out of their homes listening to him speak.
Trump also made false claims about getting rid of a regulation that would have required the construction of low-income housing in the suburbs — no such regulation has existed — and that the Obama administration was aware of spying on his 2016 campaign when reports have found there is no evidence any spying actually occurred.
In fact, Trump said the actions around his 2016 campaign amount to “treason” in his eyes and suggested he will pursue prosecutions if reelected. “That’s another reason we want to go for a long time,” he said.
This is only a partial list of the misrepresentations the president made during the speech.
Without question, the crowd was an enthusiastic one, and Trump fed off its energy, tossing red “Make America Great Again” hats to those in the audience as he arrived after a rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin. People behind the president waved signs that read “Four More Years” and “Women for Trump.” At various times the crowd chanted “U.S.A.” and “We Love You,” the latter being a chant, Trump claimed, that had never been heard outside his rallies “to the best of anyone’s knowledge.”
The president said while being president has been more difficult than he expected, “there is nothing I’ve ever enjoyed more in my life” but there was much more to be done.
Looking out over the crowd and saying how much he loved Michigan and Grand Rapids, he said he didn’t see how he could lose.
“This Is not the crowd of somebody who is going to lose the state of Michigan,” he said. “This is not the crowd of a second-place finisher.”
Contact Todd Spangler attspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@tsspangler. Read more onMichigan politics and sign up for ourelections newsletter.
Source Article from https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/11/03/donald-trump-campaign-grand-rapids-election-2020/6129108002/
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