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During a campaign stop in Michigan on Saturday, Donald Trump continued his pattern of attacking cities with large Black populations with false claims of election fraud.
This time, it was the D.
"We gotta watch Detroit. Boy-oh-boy-oh-boy," he said. "They had such horrible abuse. You know they had more ballots — you know this — they had more ballots than they had voters. Do you know that? Gee. And they didn’t want to, you know, go into that."
Two quick things you should know. First, there were not more ballots than voters, as multiple fact checks confirmed. In fact, Michigan courts rejected all of Trump and his supporters’ claims of election fraud following the 2020 election.
Second, Detroit is nearly 78% Black.
These latest remarks were simply Trump pushing the same racist nonsense he pushed after his failed campaign, accusing cities with large Black populations like Detroit, Atlanta (48% Black) and Philadelphia (40% Black) of cheating him out of a victory over Joe Biden. Trump, who’s told his followers that poll watching will be more important than voting itself in this fall’s election, also urged his supporters in December to travel to them to watch voters.
The Motor City has apparently weighed heavily on Trump ever since Biden beat him in Michigan. Last year, the Detroit News reviewed recordings of Trump from 2020 speaking with election officials in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, and urging them not to certify their votes and affirm Biden’s election victory in the state.
“Everybody knows Detroit is crooked as hell,” he reportedly said.
(Neither Trump nor the two other people on the recordings disputed a summary of them provided by the News. A fourth person on the recordings died in 2021.)
Lest you believe, for some strange reason, that Trump’s election conspiracy theories were going to cease in the lead-up to 2020, Saturday is proof to the contrary. And it’s notable that Trump is continuing this attack on cities with large Black populations during a time when his campaign has been hyping his alleged support among Black people. On one hand, he and his followers are trying to project confidence (however delusional it may be) that Black people will vote for him in sizable numbers this November.
But his conspiratorial attacks on these cities show his clear — and warranted — concern that they won’t.