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Donald Trump’s appearance in Howell, Michigan, on Tuesday sparked controversy before he even arrived. That’s because the visit continued his notable tradition of scheduling campaign stops in locations known as hotbeds for racist extremism.
Just last month, a group of white supremacists marched in Howell and expressed their support for Trump and Adolf Hitler. As journalist Jon King wrote for the Michigan Advance, the event evoked memories of Howell’s racist — and in some cases, fairly recent — history of public bigotry and the Ku Klux Klan.
So this was certainly a peculiar location for Trump to host a rally — especially when you consider that he has said nothing about the white supremacist gathering there in July and that he has a history of similar scheduling controversies. Last year, for example, he held a rally in Waco, Texas, shortly after the 30th anniversary of the deadly standoff between Branch Davidians (aka cultists) and law enforcement. Trump’s speech at that rally, in which he vowed “I am your retribution,” definitely gave off David Koresh vibes.
And in 2020, Trump reversed course and rescheduled a planned Juneteenth rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where in 1921 white mobs waged one of the deadliest race riots in history — killing as many as 300 Black people.
As a matter of fact, Trump is set to speak Wednesday in Asheboro, North Carolina, where members of a pro-Trump chapter of the KKK sought to hold a cross-burning in 2017.
But Trump seems to think he found an airtight defense for his Michigan visit. When a reporter on Tuesday asked about his response to criticism over his visit, he responded with a question of his own: “Who was here in 2021?” The answer he was fishing for — and received — was “Joe Biden.”
Of course, the big difference is that the president wasn’t visiting right after racists praised him and Hitler simultaneously.
In a statement, the Harris-Walz campaign slammed Trump for his refusal “to condemn the white supremacists who marched in his name.”
Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat whose district includes Howell, was critical as well, writing on X that Trump “didn’t come to Howell today to bring people together, to call out that hateful behavior, or to offer any kind of hopeful vision for the future.”
She said the visit “risks reopening old wounds” and added: “Real leaders should take the opportunity to condemn the hatred that has been on display.”
I’ll note that one simple way for Trump to dissociate from the racists in Howell might have been for him to avoid doing anything that suggests he shares the same bigoted ideology. But unfortunately for him, at one point Tuesday he seemed to openly fantasize about deploying the police at election time, harkening back to periods of unfettered displays of white supremacy in the U.S.
Methinks the Howell visit might not be entirely coincidental.