Trump's dark rhetoric about big cities returns to the campaign trail
Oct. 15, 2024, 2:00 PM GMT+5
The former president's recent trashing of Detroit continues a long-running theme, and where Democrats see a cruel attack, Republicans see a play for suburban and rural voters.
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.”