When Donald Trump visited Detroit last week, he unfurled a string of insults.
He compared the city, which is 77% Black, to a developing nation and posited that the “whole country will end up being like Detroit” if Vice President Kamala Harris wins.
If there was any question whether Trump thinks this is good or bad, he quickly clarified.
“You’re going to have a mess on your hands,” the former president said.
Trump’s comments continued a long-running and racially charged message in which he trashes large, Democratic-run cities. Such rhetoric was a staple of his unsuccessful re-election campaign in 2020, when he warned of crime and low-income housing spilling into the suburbs, indulging fears that decades earlier had prompted “white flight” migration from the inner cities.
Including Detroit, Trump this year has pointedly attacked the most populous cities in three battleground states crucial to winning the White House: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He denigrated Philadelphia as “ravaged by bloodshed and crime” and maligned Milwaukee as “horrible” before he traveled there for the Republican National Convention.
As in Detroit, nonwhite citizens account for a majority of the populations in Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Harris is scheduled to campaign in all three cities this week.
Trump’s attacks risk offending swing voters who don’t share his dark view of their big cities, as well as Black voters his campaign is trying to sway in what’s expected to be a close election won on the margins. But the attacks also speak to some of the prejudices and sentiments that have energized his base dating to his first campaign eight years ago.
“He didn’t say anything that most Trump voters in Michigan don’t say or believe about Detroit,” said Dennis Lennox, a GOP strategist who works in the state. “Many outstate Michiganders probably haven’t been to Detroit in years. So their perception of the city isn’t necessarily reality. Detroit is unquestionably a different and better city than it was just a decade ago.”
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, defended Detroit in a statement her political action committee issued after Trump’s visit. She asserted that “Detroit is growing by the minute as people fall in love with this special place” and warned that “Detroiters won’t forget this in November.”
Others point out the flaws in Trump’s rhetoric. Violent crime is trending down nationwide, including in some of the cities he often targets. Detroit had 252 homicides last year — the fewest since 1966.
“Crime’s down; factories are opening up,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic candidate for vice president, said last week as he campaigned in the Detroit suburb of Warren.
In a statement for this article, Trump campaign spokesperson Brian Hughes said Trump is committed to “safety and investment” in cities that “have seen their prosperity and safety under attack” from Harris and other Democratic leaders.
“Our cities have been turned into sanctuaries for illegal migrant criminals, and America’s working men and women have had to take a backseat when it comes to public services,” Hughes added. “Movements to defund the police have left the people of these urban centers to fend for themselves. President Trump wants every neighborhood in every city to be restored to the greatness we once had.”
‘Playing for the suburbs’
Brad Todd, a Republican strategist who has worked on elections in Michigan, said Trump is “playing for the suburbs,” where people “miss the days when downtown Detroit was great, and they think its problems are a failure of government.”
In focus groups Todd has conducted in Macomb County — the Detroit-area suburbs that were home to the famed “Reagan Democrats” of the 1980s — “people will spend an hour complaining about Detroit and then tell you they love it.”
The same dynamic plays out in other cities Trump has criticized.
“There are a lot of places like this,” Todd said. “It’s not everywhere, [but] there are a lot of cities where there’s a great deal of nostalgia for the cities’ best days.”
Andrew Hitt, former chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, said there is little chance Trump’s comments will harm him in that battleground state, which, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, he won in 2016 but lost in 2020.
Conservative-leaning voters in the rural parts of the state cast aspersions on Milwaukee for several reasons, Hitt said, be it their perceptions of high crime or greater resources’ flowing there or their lack of personal or cultural connections to the city beyond sports.
“It’s not going to hurt him at all with rural voters,” Hitt said of Trump’s anti-Milwaukee remarks. “But beyond that, I think it helps him with suburban voters.”
Cities in general have become a convenient foil for Trump, who has aimed his provocative rhetoric at other large cities, some of them in states likely to favor Harris. He has compared Chicago — where he owns a hotel tower and where he will participate Tuesday in a Bloomberg News interview — with war-torn Afghanistan.
Other targets include New York, where he lived until he established residency in Florida in 2019, and San Francisco, which, as the political base for Harris and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has been a frequent GOP punching bag.
All three cities have majority-nonwhite populations.
‘Like living in hell’
Trump also has a history of lashing out at Black members of Congress by disparaging the cities they represent. In 2017, seething over criticism by the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., Trump described his Atlanta district as being “in horrible shape.” In 2019, during a spat with the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., Trump called his Baltimore district “dangerous” and “disgusting.”
“Take a look at Detroit. Take a look at what’s happening in Oakland. Take a look at what’s happening in Baltimore,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall in 2020. “And everyone gets upset when I say it. They say, ‘Oh, is that a racist statement?’ It’s not a racist. Frankly, Black people come up to me and say, ‘Thank you. Thank you, sir, for saying it.’ They want help.”
“These cities,” Trump added, “it’s like living in hell.”
It’s not only large cities that Trump likes to vilify. In recent weeks, he has attacked Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado, over their immigrant communities. Trump campaigned last week in Aurora — hardly the epicenter of a swing state — and argued that the city had been overtaken by a Venezuelan prison gang. His claims, as they had in Springfield, placed him at odds with local officials, including the Republican mayor, Mike Coffman.
A Republican close to Trump’s campaign argued that his attacks on cities aren’t insults but are, rather, a pledge to solve problems that most people who live in those regions recognize.
“It’s not like he’s going to Detroit and attacking the Detroit Pistons or the Red Wings or the Tigers,” said this person, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly for the campaign. “When Trump says that type of stuff, it’s a reflection of what a lot of people outside the media bubble who live in the state think themselves.”
Victoria LaCivita, Trump’s communications director in Michigan, said in a statement that Trump “remembers when Detroit was lauded as the gold standard for auto manufacturing success and revolutionized the auto industry.” She also cited Detroit’s population decline and high homicide and poverty rates as evidence that change is warranted.
“As President Trump emphasized in his speech, his policies will usher in a new era of economic success and stability for Detroit, helping the city reach its fullest potential,” she added.
Courting the Black vote
Michigan was the site of Trump’s memorable 2016 call for Black voters to support his candidacy.
“What the hell do you have to lose?” Trump, citing poverty, high unemployment and schools that are “no good,” said in Dimondale, a largely white village 90 miles from Detroit.
At the same event, Trump predicted he would win more than 95% of the Black vote in his 2020 re-election campaign. Exit polls from that year showed him winning only 12%.
Trump has nevertheless talked of improving his standing among Black voters in his third presidential bid, even as his policy proposals and unsubstantiated claims and suspicions about voter fraud in large urban counties could alienate them.
For example, he is tying the allocation of federal funding for local police departments to the reinstatement of stop-and-frisk policies, which allow officers to randomly stop and search people for weapons. The tactics have been criticized for disproportionately targeting Black men.
Trump and his allies also have continued to raise baseless alarms about cheating at the polls in cities like Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, pledging to send more than 100,000 lawyers and volunteers to monitor the vote in battleground states. His “horrible” comment about Milwaukee was more about “crime and voter fraud,” a campaign spokesperson said at the time.
Meanwhile, a recent national NBC News poll found Harris, the nation’s first Black vice president, leading Trump 84% to 11% among Black voters — a margin similar to President Joe Biden’s commanding lead four years ago.
But many Democrats are worried that Black voters, and Black men in particular, are more open to supporting Trump than in the past or less enthusiastic about voting at all.
“We have not seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” former President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, told volunteers before a rally last week, according to a pool report. “Now, I also want to say that that seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”
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