Donald Trump spoke in Waterford Township, Michigan at an airplane hangar on Saturday, Feb. 17, for a Get Out the Vote Rally in the crucial battleground state. He appeared wearing black gloves and a red MAGA baseball cap, and immediately began lambasting some of his recent legal woes when he took the podium.
Trump’s appearance follows rulings in two separate New York cases last week. On Friday, Judge Engoron ordered Trump to pay $355 million in damages after the Trump Organization was found liable for financial fraud, which Trump vowed to appeal following the ruling. On Thursday, a separate judge ruled Trump’s criminal hush money trial will begin on March 25; the trial involves his alleged payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels and looks to determine whether he falsified business documents to conceal. More legal trouble for the former president is pending, including the outcome of the Georgia election interference case, as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade has been making headlines, bringing into question whether she can remain on the case against Trump.
In all of the above cases, Trump claimed that the judges and the DA were “lunatics” and “deranged.” Calling the country’s court system “a mess,” he accused President Joe Biden and Democrats of weaponizing the legal system. He also threw in his legal loss to E. Jean Carroll, whom he was found liable for repeatedly defaming after she accused him of sexual assault and ordered to pay $83 million last month (“I’m saying who the hell is she? Who’s the woman? It’s so unfair what’s happening in our country,” he complained), to apparently further illustrate him being a victim and suffering “persecution.”
Of being found liable for financial fraud, Trump quipped: “Judge Engoron just fined me $355 million for doing everything right.”
He also claimed people will abandon the U.S. due to rulings like the ones that have been the result of what courts have found him to be guilty of perpetrating. “Businesses are going to flee New York state, they already are taking with them tens of thousands of jobs because they can’t subject themselves to this,” he claimed. “And if this persecution of political opponents continues, no one will want to do business in the United States of America any longer. We will truly become a third world country, we are going to be. We are already in many ways.”
To tie into one of his favorite we-live-in-a-hellscape fear-mongering subjects, he segued into the border from there. “If you look at our border, we are worse than a third world country because there’s never ever in history been a border like that. Joe Biden and the fascists that control him are a threat to democracy. They’re a threat to democracy. Now he’s not smart enough to know that but he’s got people that can.”
Later, he doubled down on his immigrant alarmism. “We have a new category of crime in our country, it’s called migrant crime,” he said, and because he appears to believe Biden is the cause of this, he added: “We will call if from now on Biden migrant crime. OK? It’s Bigrant crime.” Then, he congratulated himself on ostensibly coining the phrase off the cuff, saying, “Oh that’s good, that’s smart.”
It has been five months since his last visit to Michigan, and the landscape has changed in his campaign to win the GOP nomination since then. During his last visit, the auto industry workers were striking. Since then, the United Auto Workers has endorsed Biden and all of Trump’s major Republican challengers except former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley have left the race.
Trump met his supporters in Michigan on Saturday following an appearance earlier in the day where he touted Trump sneakers that sell for $399.00, and was booed at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia. Michigan’s presidential primary election takes place Feb. 27. Trump, who has been a critic of absentee and mail-in voting, encouraged the audience on Saturday to cast early votes. “If we win Michigan, we win the election,” he said.