In his first appearance on the campaign trail since a second apparent assassination attempt, former President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening made an economic pitch to Michigan voters centered on higher tariffs and lower taxes.
In a wide-ranging discussion at a town hall in Flint, Trump criticized Vice President Kamala Harris on taxes, slamming her proposal for a billionaire minimum tax, or a tax on the unrealized capital gains of the wealthy. “I don’t know how they can possibly administer it. The only ones who are going to make money are appraisers and accountants,” Trump said. “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
He also warned that business would flee the country under Harris’s tax rates, repeated previously debunked claims about the benefits to small farms and small businesses of his estate tax changes and said he’d aim to cut energy bills in half and lower interest rates to fight inflation. “Interest rates, energy and common sense,” Trump said in response to a question about how he’d lower costs for consumers (though economists say lower rates could boost inflation).
The former president also repeated his false claims about the 2020 election and grim warnings about the direction of the country; discussed the attempts on his life; praised the Secret Service; and seemed to confuse the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska with Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. But he sought to focus on the economy and car manufacturing, claiming that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidency the U.S. auto industry would cease to exist.
“If I don’t win, you will have no auto industry within two to three years,” Trump said. “You will not have any manufacturing plants. China is going to take over all of them because of the electric car.”
Trump said he would impose 200% tariffs on vehicles made by Chinese automakers in Mexico. “I’m putting a 200% tariff on which means they’re unsellable — unsellable in the United States,” Trump said to cheers from the audience. “And then you wonder why I get shot at, right? You know, only consequential presidents get shot at.”
One problem: Trump’s claims about Chinese automakers building factories in Mexico are false. Another problem: “automaking employment has grown since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, after dropping during Trump’s first term,” the Associated Press reports. “Auto jobs dipped 0.8% during Trump’s term to just over 949,000 in January 2021, when he left office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since Biden took office that month, auto and parts jobs rose 13.6% to 1.07 million in August, so there’s no evidence of the industry disappearing.”
Trump also defended his use of tariffs more broadly, even as economists have warned that his plans would raise costs for U.S. consumers. “Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,” he said.
Spurred on by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who moderated the event and served as Trump’s White House press secretary, the former president also defended his speaking style, pushing back on Harris’s debate claim that people leave his rallies due to boredom and on reports that often describe him as rambling or meandering.
“I give these long, sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs, but they all come together,” Trump said. “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.”
Whether it was meandering or genius, Trump went on to display plenty more of it. Asked by an audience member what he sees as the major threats to Michigan automaking jobs, Trump gave a nine-minute-long answer. “When you say major threat, to me, we have one really major threat, that’s called nuclear weapons,” he said before going on to criticize talk of climate change, warn that he believes we’re closer to World War III than ever before, discuss China, India and Russia and again pitch tariffs.
What’s next: Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in Uniondale, New York, tonight.
