Former President Donald Trump took repeated aim at Democratic political foes and heaped praise on loyal Republicans as he stumped for GOP candidates in Michigan on Saturday evening.
The 45th president held one of his signature “Save America” rallies in Warren, Michigan, located just north of Detroit, to campaign for the state’s GOP gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon as she tries to oust incumbent Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom she trails in the polls. While in office, Whitmer was a frequent thorn in Trump’s side. Their widely reported feud escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Democrat became a vocal critic of Trump’s handling of the crisis. The former president slammed Whitmer on multiple fronts, going after her position on abortion, her handling of rising crime, and her own COVID-19 response.
“Michigan, you need to dump this wild-eyed extremist Gretchen Whitmer and put Tudor Dixon in the governor’s mansion,” Trump told the crowd at the Macomb County Community College Sports & Expo Center. “The first step to restoring public safety is defeating the radical Democrats this November, and that starts with trouncing Whitmer.”
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Focusing on her handling of the pandemic, he said: “Don’t forget the only one that benefited was her husband. Her husband was a big beneficiary. Gretchen Whitmer is one of the most radical, most sinister governors in America, you know that she cruelly imposed the most brutal lockdowns in the entire country, causing Michigan to lose more jobs than any other state in the union.”
Whitmer was far from the only Democrat who faced Trump’s ire Saturday evening.
The former president spent some of his nearly two-hour speech going after New York Attorney General Letitia James’s civil suit against him, even presenting a video midway through his remarks of clips of prominent legal analysts on both sides of the aisle questioning the legitimacy of her efforts. He called James “racist” and described her as “one of the worst” attorneys general in the nation.
He also mocked Vice President Kamala Harris over her gaffe this week, in which she mistakenly touted the U.S. “alliance with the Republic of North Korea” while speaking from Korea’s Demilitarized Zone.
Trump was touting his rising poll numbers in the wake of the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in August when he said: “We’re beating Kamala Harris, the North Korea sympathizer. She’s a sympathizer. We’re beating her by 10 points. Now she likes North Korea, and I think that was one of the worst mistakes of all. Can you imagine? They’re standing on the border, North Korea’s over there shooting off missiles as she’s speaking. They shot out two missiles.”
As for the aftermath of the FBI search, Trump pulled no punches when discussing the matter, claiming the bureau and the Justice Department treated him differently than previous presidents of both parties.
Offering a new excuse for his own handling of classified materials, he claimed that prior U.S. heads of state had also mishandled documents but faced no legal ramifications.
“You have to see, Bush had a warehouse, Bush Sr. had a warehouse. Crooked Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 emails, many of which were classified. Hillary Clinton [and] Bill Clinton lost a lot of stuff. Obama — didn’t they say 33 million pages of stuff? God, where is it? What happened?”
Regarding Republicans, Trump made particular note of Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who testified to the House Jan. 6 select committee this week that she still maintained her belief that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread voter fraud.
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Trump told the crowd he would like to “thank a great woman named Ginni Thomas … for her courage and strength” and for telling the panel “that she still believes the 2020 election was stolen.”
“She didn’t say, ‘Oh, well, I’d like not to get involved. Of course it was a wonderful election,'” the former president explained. “She didn’t wait and sit around and say, ‘Well, let me give you a maybe a different answer that I’ve been saying for the last two years now.’ She didn’t wilt under pressure, like so many others that are weak people and stupid people, because once they wilt, they end up being a witness for a long time. She said what she thought, she said what she believed in.”
“Too many Republicans are weak, and they’re afraid, and they better get strong fast,” he continued.
