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Though portions of Donald Trump’s visit to Detroit over the weekend were portrayed by his campaign as efforts to make inroads with Black voters, Trump used the trip to peddle a bigoted election conspiracy theory that he has frequently used to target Black communities.
Trump’s reported comments last week bashing Milwaukee as a “horrible” city placed his disdain for cities with large Black populations in focus.
Trump has developed a reputation for portraying these cities, such as Atlanta and Baltimore, as crime-infested hellholes.
Trump has developed a reputation for portraying these cities, such as Atlanta and Baltimore, as crime-infested hellholes. And he leaned into such attacks after his election loss to Joe Biden in 2020, when he falsely accused many of these cities of allowing rampant election fraud.
As an example, he reportedly urged officials in Michigan not to certify election results, claiming “everybody knows Detroit is crooked as hell.” Since then, he has told his followers to “guard the vote” in cities like Detroit and that poll watching is even more important than voting itself.
During his appearance at an event put on by right-wing activist group Turning Point Action, Trump said that he has told the host group’s founder, Charlie Kirk, and Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley that the No. 1 priority is to “guard the vote.”
I said to Charlie and I said to Michael: Listen, we don’t need votes. We got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote. We need to guard the vote. We need to stop the steal. We don’t need votes. We have to stop — focus, don’t worry about votes. We’ve got all the votes. I was in Florida yesterday — every house has a Trump sign. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. We have to guard the vote.
He went on to call mail-in ballots “treacherous” and ballot drop boxes “horrible.”
And Trump wasn’t done there. During a panel discussion hosted by a Black pastor in Detroit, Trump claimed nearly unanimous support from the heads of historically Black colleges and universities:
I think all of them are voting for Trump ... I’d say 99% of them. And if they aren’t — I don’t know what the hell the other side did — but we’ll start an investigation or something, OK?
These claims are two branches of the same conspiratorial tree.
No one has cast a single ballot in this year’s election, so the idea that Trump and his campaign “don’t need votes” — based in part on the number of yard signs he has seen or his baseless claim that HBCU presidents love him — illustrates that this is not some brilliant political tactician we’re talking about.
This is a man grooming his followers to reject the election results if they don’t fall in his favor. And that just underscores how big a threat Trump poses to democracy as we know it.