Trump revels before packed Michigan crowd
Reeling from another crisis of his own making, President Donald Trump tried to refocus attention on his Democratic rival at a rally in battleground Michigan on Thursday as he pushed to move past revelations that he purposefully played down the danger of the coronavirus last winter.
But the virus controversy followed him as he faced new pushback from local officials worried about the growing size of his rallies and his campaign’s repeated flouting of public health guidelines intended to halt the COVID-19 spread. That includes Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who raised alarms about Thursday’s event, warning it would make recovery harder.
Trump, however, reveled in the crowd of several thousand, packed shoulder-toshoulder in a cavernous airport hangar, mostly without masks — with Air Force One on display as his backdrop.
“This is not the crowd of a person who comes in second place,” Trump declared to cheers as he railed against Whitmer for current state restrictions.
“Tell your governor to open up your state!” he demanded, saying Michigan would be better if it “had a governor who knew what the hell she was doing.”
Before departing the White House, Trump denied he had lied to the nation as he continued to grapple with fallout from a new book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward. In a series of interviews with Woodward, the president spoke frankly about the dangers posed by the virus — even as he downplayed them publicly — and admitted he had tried to mislead the public.
Trump, answering questions at the White House, insisted “there was no lie” in his often dismissive public comments and said he was only trying to project calm. He offered a similar explanation to his Michigan supporters while taking a potshot at Woodward.
“This whack job that wrote the book, he said, ‘well Trump knew a little bit,’ ” Trump told the crowd. “They wanted me to come out and scream, ‘people are dying, we’re dying.’ No, no. We did it just the right way. We have to be calm. We don’t want to be crazed lunatics.”
But Trump seemed to have no issue leaning into fear at the rally. He lobbed several unsubstantiated accusations at Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and Democrats, including charging that they want to shut down auto plants — despite the Obama administration’s work to save the industry — and “delay” the production of a coronavirus vaccine.