Trump allies bash Harris, lean into conspiracies at Farmington Hills town hall

Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Tipton), Republican National Committeewoman Hima Kolanagireddy, Michigan Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt (R-Porter Twp.) and former Republican governor candidate Tudor Dixon spoke at a town hall in Farmington Hills on Sept. 14 in support of former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. | Kyle Davidson

While allies of former President Donald Trump gathered in Farmington Hills on Friday for a town hall as part of Trump’s “Agenda 47 Policy Tour,” policy discussions remained scant, as members of the panel played up conspiracies pushed by the former president in their efforts to mobilize voters.

The panel, which consisted of Republican former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Tipton), Republican National Committeewoman Hima Kolanagireddy, Michigan Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt (R-Porter Twp.) and Republican former gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon, briefly touched on concerns of inflation, border security and Trump’s proposal to remove taxes on tips and overtime pay, while multiple panel members conspiracies of election fraud and the existence of a shadow government or “deep state.” 

The event took place as both the campaigns of Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris continue to lavish attention on the battleground state of Michigan. Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, campaigned in Grand Rapids and East Lansing this week and both Trump and his vice presidential nominee, Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, are slated to campaign Tuesday in Flint and Sparta, respectively.

Although she didn’t participate in the town hall, Trump attorney Alina Habba spoke briefly at the beginning of the event. She bragged that she had been placed under gag order while representing Trump in his civil fraud trial and that she had been sanctioned for nearly $1 million for a case brought against 31 individuals, including former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, former top FBI officials and the Democratic Party who investigated whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia in the 2016 election. 

In the order on sanctions, U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks said Trump’s complaint, which accused defendants of conspiring to sink his 2016 campaign by alleging ties to Russia, “should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it. Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim.”

Habba also repeated Trump’s claim that Harris supported funding transitions for undocumented immigrants in prison. This statement may have been a reference to Harris’s answer on a 2019 ACLU questionnaire where she said she supported “policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained.”

Ramaswamy also took aim at Harris before opening up the panel for audience questions.

“She’s not a communist; she’s not a Marxist. She’s a cog in the system actually. I mean, call her communist; it gives her too much credit. It assumes that she has an ideology,” he said.

“I mean, say what you want. [U.S. Sen.] Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), I like the guy. I don’t respect his policies. I like him because he at least has policies, even if they’re ones that I disagree with. Kamala Harris is one step worse than that, because she’s got nothing. It’s a flag that waves in whatever direction the wind is blowing,” Ramaswamy said.

Trump and his campaign have repeatedly criticized Harris, arguing the vice president has flip-flopped on various issues including dropping support for a ban on fracking and support for Medicare for All, both of which she supported during her 2020 bid for president. She has also taken a tougher stance on immigration, and no longer supports decriminalizing border crossings as she did in 2019. 

Harris’s campaign has levied similar criticisms at Trump, particularly on issues of marijuana and abortion. During his time in office, Trump took steps to oppose marijuana use but has recently supported reclassifying the drug to allow for medical use. His stance on abortion has repeatedly shifted, vowing that he would sign a 20-week national abortion ban passed by the U.S. House in 2017. Trump has claimed he would not sign a national abortion ban, saying the issue should be handled by the states — but he did not recommit to that during last week’s debate.

After echoing Trump’s call for the largest mass deportation in American history, arguing that’s what it means to stand for the rule of law in the nation, Ramaswamy echoed Trump’s conspiracy of a deep state, alleging that government bureaucrats are influencing government policies and elected officials.

“What does it mean to be American? It means the people we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government, not the shadow government and the deep state, the three letter agencies that are running the show today, which actually reminds me of the second mass deportation we need in this country. It’s not just millions of illegals out of the United States. It’s millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of Washington, D.C. That is how you drain the swamp,” Ramaswamy said. 

Panelists also pushed Trump’s claims that the justice system has been weaponized against him. The former president is at the center of multiple legal cases including mishandling top secret documents, attempting to overturn the 2020 election, as well as anti-racketeering charges in Georgia and has made numerous attempts to paint the cases as political in nature. He was convicted of 34 felony counts in May for falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. 

While answering a question from a pro-Trump content creator who said he was facing censorship on social media, Ramaswamy argued government actors are working to censor conservative content creators on social media, echoing claims from a case before the Supreme Court earlier this year accusing President Joe Biden’s administration of colluding with social media companies to suppress freedom of speech by encouraging the removal of misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 election. 

The court ultimately decided 6-3 that Missouri and Louisiana which brought the case alongside seven co-plaintiffs could not demonstrate any harm or substantial risk that they will suffer an injury in the future, and therefore did not have standing. 

When answering a question on election security, Walberg said he had been “canceled” after voting to object to the electoral college count in the 2020 election, in which Biden defeated Trump 306-232 in the electoral college and by a 4-point margin in the popular vote. 

He criticized Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s handling of the 2020 election saying, “What our secretary of state did here, what she told her clerks to do, was illegal. So even if the vote count came out right, it was done wrong.”

While the then-GOP-controlled Michigan Senate Oversight Committee released a report in 2020 determining there was no evidence of voter fraud in the state, Benson has faced multiple legal challenges over election guidances issued to clerks. 

Republicans successfully challenged Benson’s signature matching guidelines issued prior to the 2020 election, with her 2023 signature guidance that clerks should initially presume the validity of absentee ballot signatures being struck down in June. 

While Republicans painted the guidance as an effort to sidestep safeguards for absentee ballots, the remainder of Benson’s guidance was upheld, allowing election officials to consider explanations for signature discrepancies, including that a voter’s signature may change over time due to age or disability, that it was made in haste, or was written on an uneven surface.

Both Walberg and Kolanagireddy made reference to disproven claims of illegal activity during election night at Detroit’s former TCF Center in 2020. 

“Are you willing to be an election worker, a poll watcher, a ballot counter? Are you willing to stand there and take down pizza boxes from the windows? If we do that, we’ll win,” Walberg said, likely referencing the decision to cover the windows at the TCF Center after individuals standing outside the polling place refused to stop taking unauthorized photos and videos of poll workers and their paperwork. 

Ramaswamy closed the town hall by accusing the media of attacking Biden during his presidential campaign in order to build credibility to prop up Harris, and continuing to espouse claims that the U.S. government is being run by bureaucrats. 

“The truth of the matter is, the people we elect to run the government. Mostly, they’re not even the ones running the government. It’s a machine. It’s the deep state that sits underneath it. And if you want a candidate who’s going to get in there and finally not just bring a chisel, but bring a jackhammer to break the thing if needed. Fire 75% of those federal bureaucrats; send them packing. Shut down agencies like the U.S. Department of Education; send that money back to the states and to the people,” Ramaswamy said, proclaiming his support for Trump. 

“There’s always a risk. Maybe don’t cut enough fat. That’s what most people do. I’m going to go in there, well, I’m going to cut just the right amount and see how it goes. No, it doesn’t work, because they’re going to grow right back,” Ramaswamy said. “What Donald Trump’s going to do is, you know what? You might go in there, you might cut so much fat that maybe you cut some muscle along the way. Maybe things are a little bit rough at times. But you know what? That’s what it takes to actually get this right. So it takes somebody from the outside who’s doing this for the right reasons. That’s why I’m supporting Donald Trump, and I think we need more of that in American politics.”