By Michael Woyton
How many times have you seen a comedian or a musician say, “It’s great to be in [name that city] today,” as a way to endear themselves to crowd?
Convicted felon and former president Donald Trump used a different tactic in the city of Detroit Thursday while holding forth at the Detroit Economic Club.
He chose to insult his host city of Detroit.
In a long, rambling — well, normal for him — speech, he talked about the threat Vice President Kamala Harris would bring, he believes, to the United States if she wins the 2024 presidential election, according to reporting in the Detroit Free Press.
Subscribe for free:
“The whole country is going to be like, you want to know the truth?” the Free Press quoted him as saying. “It’ll 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.”
Trump went on to repeat his claim that Harris destroyed San Francisco, without offering any specifics.
The Free Press said that, while the audience didn’t appear to have any reaction to Trump’s remark about their city, some state and local leaders did.
Democratic Michigan House Speaker Joe Tate lit into the former president on the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
“Donald Trump might not remember where he is right now so here’s a quick reminder about what Detroit’s all about,” Tate wrote, adding that the city bounced back after Trump killed its jobs, closed its business and tried to throw out its votes.
The Atlantic contributing writer Jemele Hill posted on X with the suggestion that the clip of Trump’s remarks be plastered on billboards, television ads and elsewhere.
“He insulted the entire city and it isn’t the first time,” Hill wrote. “He’s invalidated Detroit voters countless times, and instructed his people to riot in Detroit over the vote count in 2020. For the Detroit Economic Club to invite this absolute clown to speak there is a slap in the face to all Detroiters.”
Elsewhere in his almost two-hour speech, the former president “drifted in and out of coherency,” according to reporting by The New Republic’s Edith Olmsted.
Among the rants and weaves — a word Trump uses to make excuses for his inability to put together coherent sentences — were such topics as Biden circles, the word “grocery,” rocket engines landing on a raft, Harris being “dumber than hell” and Democrats opposing proof of citizenship to vote in presidential elections, which is already required by the federal government.
Take a gander at the second clip below (I didn’t dare transcribe it):
Harris has been saying that people should really listen to what Trump says during his rallies and speeches. All too often what ends up in the press has been cleaned up drastically — or “sane-washed,” which is the term going around now.
Olivier Knox, of U.S. News & World Report said “sane-washing” is the way reporters covering Trump “sometimes take a rally speech filled with incoherent asides and falsehoods and deliver bite-sized news nuggets that don’t convey how wild the event was.”
Knox added as an explanation, not as a defense, that reporters are “trained to focus on the signal, not the noise.”
I would hope, after seeing the way President Joe Biden was treated by the press before he decided to withdraw from the race, that every verbal wandering, every lie and every mention of retribution — every noise — made by Trump be covered in the same way.
Our democracy depends on hearing what is actually being said.
Lead art: Screen grab from Right Side Broadcasting Network.
On Second Thought 