In Grand Rapids, Michigan on Saturday, newly-minted Republican nominee Donald Trump held his first rally since a lone gunman attempted to assassinate the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania exactly a week prior. Recalling the shooting, which left one man, Corey Comperatore, dead and others injured, Trump said that he “took a bullet for democracy.”
“They keep saying, ‘he’s a threat to democracy,’” Trump told the Michigan crowd. “I’m saying, ‘What the hell did I do for democracy? Last week, I took a bullet for democracy. What did I do against democracy?’ Crazy.”
Trump opened his remarks by speaking about the shooting, saying, “Terrible, incredible. What a day it was. As I said earlier this week, I stand before you only by the grace of Almighty God. I shouldn’t be here.”
During Trump’s Thursday address at the Republican National Convention, he said that he would tell the crowd “exactly what happened” that day in Butler, adding, “and you’ll never hear it from me a second time, because it’s actually too painful to tell.”
Trump’s Saturday rally comes just two days after the RNC wrapped in neighboring Wisconsin—a week full of speeches from Trump allies, including his newly-announced running partner, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, who made his first appearance as the vice presidential nominee at the Saturday rally.
Just as Trump’s relatively softened tone at the beginning of his RNC speech quickly devolved into the former president’s boilerplate laundry list of insults, grievances, and misrepresentations, so was the tenor of his Michigan rally address.
“At this very moment, Democrat Party bosses are frantically trying to overthrow the results of their own party’s primaries to dump Crooked Joe Biden from the ballot,” Trump said, referencing the growing movement encouraging President Joe Biden to bow out. On Kamala Harris, who would likely head the ticket if Biden were to step aside, Trump dubbed her “laughing Kamala.” “You ever watch her laugh?” he continued, “she’s crazy. You know you can tell a lot by a laugh. No, she’s crazy. She’s nuts. She’s not as crazy as Nancy Pelosi, crazy Nancy Pelosi.”
At one point, Trump repeated a lie he has told in all three presidential campaigns: That years ago, he was chosen as “Michigan’s Man of the Year.”
“I was a business guy, I did well, I liked the state, but I don’t know. I heard ‘Man of The Year’ Michigan; I thought that’s cool,” Trump said nonchalantly. “They were giving it to me for, I guess, the fact that I employed a lot of people. I did real well.”
Per a CNN fact-check, “Nobody has ever been able to find any evidence that he was ever named ‘Man of the Year’ in Michigan before he ran for president. The Wolverine State does not give out a ‘Man of the Year’ award; Trump has never lived in Michigan and has never specified who supposedly gave him this award and when.”
Trump also had a lot of praise to go around. He lauded Elon Musk, saying he’s “as smart as you get.” The authoritarian Chinese President Xi Jinping wrote him a “beautiful note” following the assassination attempt, Trump shared, adding that Xi “makes guys like Biden look like babies.” And, of course, a mention of the “late great Hannibal Lecter” while piling on about immigration.
Trump also attempted to distance himself, again, from Project 2025, a conservative playbook headed by the Heritage Foundation and crafted in part by at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration, according to a CNN review. Earlier this month, Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social that he knows “nothing about Project 2025,” adding, “By now, after all of these years, everyone knows where I stand on EVERYTHING!”
“Some on the right, the severe right, came up with this Project 2025, and I don’t even know, I mean some of them, I know who they are,” Trump said at his Saturday rally. “But they’re very, very conservative, just like you have, they’re sort of the opposite of the radical left,” he continued, “I don’t know what the hell it is.”
Throughout the speech, Trump consistently asserted that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he and his team will do whatever possible to make sure that doesn’t happen again. (Reviews from all over the country, including ones conducted by members of Trump’s own administration, have found that there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the last presidential election.)
Trump claimed that “the only way” Democrats can get elected “is to cheat.” The only way that Trump could lose, he continued later on, would be if “crooked judges“ intervened.
“But,” he assured the crowd, “we’ll get it overturned, anything that happens.”
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