In a rambling campaign speech that touched on just about everything, Donald Trump on Friday praised foreign leaders as “street smart” for sending alleged criminals to America, saying he would take it even further if he were in their shoes.
“These leaders, so street smart,” Trump said, speaking at a rally in Walker, Michigan. “And I would have been worse than them because actually Venezuela still has some people in their jails. I would have had everybody out into the United States. They probably ran out of buses and planes.”
And he warned his MAGA followers at the rally: “The rest of them are coming.”
During remarks that were billed to be about bringing back Michigan’s car industry, he reverted to his habit of favoring fear-mongering about immigration over discussing the economy.
“They grab young girls and they slice them up in front of their parents,” he said.
Data suggests that undocumented immigrants commit far fewer crimes than native-born citizens. But that’s not stopping Trump.
“They’re conquering your communities,” he said later on. “You go out to Aurora, in Colorado, where they’re taking over with AK-47s, real estate. They’re in the real estate development business, just like me. Except I never got to use guns to do it.”
The former president called opponent Kamala Harris “stupid” and “incompetent,” knocking her on her immigration record.
Harris, who Trump calls the Biden administration’s “border czar,” was heading to Arizona for her first stop at the border as the Democratic nominee on Friday. She was set to announce plans to toughen Joe Biden’s border policy, which suspends asylum claims when border crossing numbers get too high.
Trump had two scheduled campaign stops in Michigan on Friday and his team planned to launch a statewide bus tour over the weekend. The Great Lakes State is one of three segments of the “Blue Wall” that will be key to winning the presidency. The latest polls show Harris with a slight lead over Trump in Michigan. A recent Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll, for instance, found the vice president three points ahead, within the margin of error.
Though he did spend a portion of his speech focusing on the economic issues that voters say matter most, more striking in Trump’s Friday speech were his out-there claims, which weren’t limited solely to immigration. He praised Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who opened for him, for having good ideas on health care, promising the former opponent would be “a big part” of making America healthy again.
If Harris is elected, Trump warned, she would “take your cars, take your money, take your guns.” He referred to the storm that hit his home state and killed more than three dozen people as just “a little hurricane.”
