Former President Donald Trump takes questions on the auto industry, inflation, taxes and border security at a Sept. 17, 2024 town hall in Flint, Mich. | Kyle Davidson
As both presidential candidates amp up their efforts to win over battleground state voters, former President Donald Trump made another stop in Michigan Tuesday, hosting a town hall in Flint alongside Arkansas Gov. and former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
The town hall marked Trump’s first campaign appearance since the FBI began investigating a possible second assassination attempt against the former president. His running mate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), hosted another campaign event in Sparta earlier in the day where he railed against Democrats for the shooting in Pennsylvania as well the incident in Florida on Sunday.
“They want to do everything that they can to silence Donald Trump, and they send that signal with every action that they take,” Vance said. “Well, if you’re trying to silence Donald Trump and you’re sending the message we have to do everything that we can to silence Donald Trump, a crazy person is eventually going to take that message to heart. Thank God nothing truly tragic has happened to Donald. Democrats have gotta cut this crap out.”
Upon taking the stage in front of thousands of supporters at the Dort Financial Center, Trump wasted no time in spouting disproven claims that the 2020 election was stolen after Huckabee Sanders asked Trump why he chose to run a third time.
“We ran in 2016 and it was amazing, it was amazing and we won. We then ran in 2020 and we did much better than 2016, people don’t like to hear it. ‘Oh he’s a conspiracy theorist.’ We got millions and millions more votes. We did much better. Wasn’t even a contest,” Trump said.
Trump has continued to falsely claim the results of the 2020 election were rigged. He lost to President Joe Biden, who received 81.2 million votes versus Trump’s 74.2 million. Biden won the Electoral College 306-232.
In addition to pushing his “Big Lie,” Trump repeated his claim that Chinese auto companies were building auto plants in Mexico to ship across the border without being charged taxes.
“They’re building these massive auto plants, and they think they’re going to make tens of thousands of automobiles and sell them here, no tax, no nothing,” Trump said.
When the Associated Press asked auto industry experts about Trump’s claim in July, they were unable to identify any such plants under construction, and could only point to one small Chinese auto assembly plant operating in Mexico.
Although Trump has repeatedly credited himself with saving the American auto industry through his tariffs on China, economists and industry experts have argued Trump’s policies either hurt the auto industry or had little impact.
Later in his speech, Trump repeated his attacks on United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, whose union endorsed in July Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I’ve never met [Fain], but what he’s done to your union, and what he’s done by agreeing to allow this country to say, we’re going all electric, which at some point they’re going to end up taking back that mandate, because that mandate is insane,” Trump said.
While there is no mandate requiring the sale of electric cars, Trump has repeatedly referred to the Biden administration’s goal for 50% of all vehicles sold in the U.S. by 2030 to be electric as a mandate.
During contract negotiations in 2023, Fain was able to secure commitments from the Detroit Three automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis — to bring thousands of electric vehicle and battery plant jobs under the union’s national agreements.
Harris’ campaign didn’t wait for Trump’s town hall to conclude before issuing its own criticism of Trump’s record on manufacturing and auto jobs. with U.S. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Bloomfield Twp.) blasting Trump’s economic record in a statement released ahead of the rally.
“Under Donald Trump’s watch, Michigan lost 280,000 jobs as he handed out tax giveaways to billionaires and corporations. A second Trump term would be even worse — raising costs on Michigan families by nearly $4,000 a year, crushing auto jobs, and ceding Michigan’s global auto manufacturing leadership to the Chinese government,” Peters said.
“The only candidate in this race who understands working families is Vice President Harris, who has a plan to lower costs, bring good-paying manufacturing jobs back home, and ensure Michigan workers continue to lead the world in auto manufacturing,” he said.
The Harris campaign also pointed to a report from Atlas Public Policy Institute’s EV Hub which found the U.S. is outpacing China in investments into electric vehicle manufacturing. The campaign also boasted that the United States’ trade deficit with China hit its lowest level since 2010 under the Biden administration.
Alongside taking occasional prompts from Huckabee Sanders, Trump took three questions from audience members, although the former president’s answers frequently rambled or veered into other topics entirely.
“I give these long, sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs, but they all come together. I do it a lot. I do it with [Gen.] ‘Raisin’ Cane, that story. I do it with the story on the catapults on the aircraft carriers. I do it with a lot of different stories. When I mention Dr. Hannibal Lecter. I’m using that as an example of people that are coming in — from ‘Silence of the Lambs’ — I use it,” Trump said. “They say, ‘It’s terrible.’ So they say, so I’ll give this long, complex area, for instance, that I talked about a lot of different territory. The bottom line is I said the most important thing, we’re going to bring more plants into your state and this country to make automobiles, we’re going to be bigger than before.”
“The fake news likes to say, ‘Oh, he was rambling.’ No, no, that’s not rambling. That’s genius. When you can connect the dots. Now, now, Sarah, if you couldn’t connect the dots, you got a problem. But every dot was connected, and many stories were told in that little paragraph,” Trump said.
When one audience member, a third-generation autoworker, asked Trump what he saw as the threats to the auto industry and his plans to eliminate those threats, Trump immediately pivoted to nuclear threats and foreign diplomacy, saying, “It’s the single biggest threat to the world, not only Michigan, to the world, and you’re not going to care so much about making cars if that stuff starts happening and we have people that are not good at negotiation,” before blaming Biden for the war in Ukraine.
He went on to criticize individuals concerned with climate change before arguing the U.S. was losing business to China and Mexico, touting his “reciprocal trade act” where the U.S. would respond to tariffs levied by other countries by charging them the same tariff, saying Michigan would be the largest beneficiary from this plan.
When Huckabee Sanders asked what he would do to secure the nation, Trump reupped his campaign promises to shut down the U.S. border and increase oil production, before discussing drugs, saying, “Unless you have the death penalty for drug dealers, you’ll never get rid of the drug problem. Put that through your head, OK? Put that through your head. And I don’t know if our country is ready for it.”
Trump also received a question on how he would bring down the cost of food and groceries. While he discussed his hopes of lowering energy costs, the federal interest rates and working alongside farmers, Trump later shifted back to border security, criticizing Democrats saying they’d changed their stance on creating a strong border.
Earlier this year, Senate Democrats and Republicans brokered a deal which would have added more than 1,500 new Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel, funded the installation of 100 cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect fentanyl, and established an emergency authority allowing the president and secretary of Homeland Security to temporarily prohibit individuals from seeking asylum when the Southwest border is overwhelmed, with limited exceptions.
However, Trump vocally opposed the legislation, vowing to “fight it all the way” and cheering the bill’s failure, with multiple lawmakers blaming Trump for tanking the deal.
In the final question of the evening, a local contractor asked Trump about his tax plan, expressing concerns of a tax increase under Harris.
With large portions of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act set to expire in 2025, Trump jumped at the opportunity to criticize Harris, arguing she would terminate his administration’s tax cuts, though Harris has previously committed to preserving the 2017 law’s tax cuts for those earning under $400,000 a year according to a report from Reuters.
He also criticized Harris’s plan to raise the capital gains tax rate to 28% for those making more than $1 million each year, arguing it would “drive every business out of the United States.”
“A lot of these people are international business people. A lot of these companies are international. They don’t care if they’re here or someplace else. They go for the best deal. They go for their shareholders if they raise the taxes like that, they go to other countries,” Trump said.
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