Eric Trump, son of Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump, attends the 11th Hour Family Leaders Meeting at the Concord Convention Center in Concord, North Carolina on October 21, 2024. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
In between campaign stops in Michigan over the weekend by former President Donald Trump, and visits planned Tuesday by GOP vice presidential nominee, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s son, Eric, was in Wyandotte Monday trying to fire up the base with the election just a week away.
He visited a packed reception hall in the battleground Downriver area with several hundred enthusiastic supporters. Trump — whose wife, Lara, co-chairs the Republican National Committee — last was in Michigan in June, when he spoke at a church for the ReAwaken America Tour headed by Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. At that event, Eric Trump defended his father, who had just been convicted of 34 felonies in a hush money case tied to the 2016 election.
On Monday, Trump carried forth many of his father’s campaign themes, often at odds with reality, of an economy in tatters, mass voting by people in the country illegally and a justice system “rigged” against Donald Trump.
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“We’re fighting to save something that we love and that’s this beautiful flag right here,” said Eric Trump, pointing to the flag on stage. “It is deeply under attack by crooked, corrupt individuals. And we all know it.”
Monday’s campaign event came on the heels of a Madison Square Garden rally in New York City Sunday that was widely panned as having insulted Latinos and African Americans and attacked Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, over her race.
Trump tried to paint a different picture of the event, saying the sold out auditorium of about 20,000 supporters demonstrated the love for his father, but then also indicated a deep-seated antipathy for Democrats.
“If you want to talk about ground zero for the war against my father, New York City, which is a city he built. We have thousands of employees in New York,” said Trump. “So much of that city was based on Donald Trump and yet we walked in yesterday despite all the legal lawfare and you see the love and you realize, it’s not New York. It’s not Chicago. It’s not a lot of these kind of far left places. It’s not us against them. It’s really us against … They’re truly bad people. Truly bad people. These people, most of them have never had a job in their life. They go to Washington, D.C., and they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”
As his father has done for most of his years in the political spotlight, the younger Trump made an economic appeal based on what was described as an unfairly imbalanced trade system.
“Try and send a Harley Davidson over to China. Why is it that all of their boats go from China into the United States and effectively have a bit of water going over, like, the gunnels of the boat because they’re so damn heavy. And then as they’re going back to China, you can see, like, the props halfway out of the water because they’re so buoyant because there’s nothing on them. And yet we can make stuff better than anybody in the world. No one can rival us. No one,” he said to wild applause and cheering.
Trump complained the billions of dollars being spent to assist Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion was wasted on people who “shoot each other in the face,” and “don’t even know what the hell they’re fighting for.”
“While you have deserted factories here, while half the communities in this country have cell phone service that sucks while our educational system in the country is ranked 30th in the world. What’s wrong with our priorities?” he said, then moving into an attack on electric vehicles, another primary theme of his father’s campaign.
“Guys, they’re destroying our auto industry and no one other than my father, no one’s talking about it. I mean, how can you penalize a car company because consumers aren’t buying their product because they don’t buy into it for whatever reason and therefore you’re going to penalize a company? It’s so not sensible. But that’s what you get with [President] Joe Biden,” he said, again referencing an imagined government mandate that would eventually only allow for EVs to be produced.
While there is no mandate, there are instead voluntary target goals set by the Biden administration for 50% of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. to be electric by 2030. While Republicans argue that new Environmental Protection Agency-issued vehicle emissions standards would effectively ban gas-powered vehicles, policy experts have told FactCheck.org that automakers would have flexibility in how they meet the new standards, with the option to make internal combustion engines more efficient.
Trump also pursued his father’s tendency toward conspiracy theories surrounding immigration, arguing that the Biden/Harris administration was purposely letting people into the country illegally for political benefit.
“They want them to vote and they want to change the census. Because it’s not just citizens that count for the U.S. Census. And that means that they can pick up congressional seats, which means that [Harris] has more opposition on the other end because they’ll just pick up congressional seats in very, very dark blue areas. And then anything with any common sense, they will allow to pass. Right? They’ll own a branch of government,” said Trump.
Eric Trump speaks at the ReAwaken America Tour in Sterling Heights on June 7, 2024. (Photo:Anna Liz Nichols)
There is no evidence, despite repeated investigations, that those in the country illegally are voting in any appreciable manner. As the Brennan Center for Justice reported, noncitizen voting is “vanishingly rare.”
Regardless, Trump went further, claiming that the administration has flown 320,000 “illegal immigrants into cities all across the country and landed them at 3 o’clock in the morning.”
But as CNN reported, that allegation is misleading in that it omits the fact that those being flown in were migrants already vetted and approved for entry while awaiting the adjudication of their asylum claims.
Trump closed out the rally with an exhortation to supporters that the clock was ticking toward Election Day on Nov. 5 and what he hoped would be a change for the better.
“Guys, I’m gonna tell you, I’m gonna spend every single second and every single minute over the next seven days,” he said. “I’m going to fight. He [Donald Trump] is going to fight. We’re never gonna take our foot off the pedal. And we’re gonna restore the greatness of the greatest country in the world.”
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