Trump brags about Musk’s $45m donations and says he took ‘bullet for democracy’

During his speech Thursday night, Trump again repeated the false claim that he was given a non-existent Man of the Year award in Michigan.

He’s been telling this humdinger for years.

Donald Trump may have been in Michigan, cradle of the US auto industry, for a campaign rally on Thursday, but that didn’t stop him from lashing out against the industry’s most powerful union, the United Auto Workers.

“They’ve got to get rid of that guy,” he said of UAW leader Shawn Fain. “He’s bad news.”

The UAW endorsed Biden in January, praising his support for striking workers and US manufacturing of EVs.

“Joe Biden bet on the American worker while Donald Trump blamed the American worker,” Fain said at the time.

“If our endorsement must be earned, Joe Biden has earned it.”

His ear may have been bandaged, but otherwise, Trump seemed little different than his old self, continuing to mock Democrats, lie about the 2020 election, demonize migrants in racist terms, praise right-wing dictators, and tell bizarre stories of dubious truthfulness.

Trump didn’t waste time in quickly addressing the recent assassination attempt.

“I stand before you only by the grace of almighty God,” he told the crowd in Grand Rapids. “I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here.”

More details in our full story.

Trump made the comments at a rally in Michigan on Saturday afternoon. The event comes one week after Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at his Butler, Pennsylvania rally last weekend. Crooks killed one attendee and injured two others while one of his shots grazed Trump’s ear.

“Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25, I don’t even know, some of them I know who they are, but they’re very, very conservative,” Trump said. “They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left.”

“You have the radical left and the radical right and they come up — I don’t know what the hell it is, it’s Project 25,” he continued. “‘He’s involved in project — and then they read some of the things and they are extreme, they’re seriously extreme.

Katie Hawkinson has the story.

The Trump campaign is reportedly already planning for a potential battle with Kamala Harris if Joe Biden decides to drop out of the 2024 race.

That’s included drawing up attack ads, poll-testing Harris’s vulnerabilities on various issues, and compiling opposition research, two individuals briefed on the matter told The New York Times.

The Trump camp’s thinking is that if Biden drops out, Harris will be the most likely replacement, given that the Democrats wouldn’t want to alienate the Black voters in their base by sidelining the nation’s first Black vice-president, the individuals told the paper.

The effort to plan for a Trump-Harris match-up predates even the Republican National Convention, according to the sources, with the Trump campaign reportedly planning out anti-Harris signs and videos that could’ve debuted at the RNC if the Democrats had announced a switch-up ahead of the event.

More details in our full story.

“This is an invasion of our country,” Trump said of migrants entering the US.

“With policy like this, nobody can get elected,” Trump continued, talking about Democrats. “The only way you can get elected is to cheat, ant they are really good at it. That’s the only thing they are good at.”

Trump then reiterated his threat to carry out “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

We’ve now entered the foreign policy section of Trump’s stump speech, and it’s predictably bizarre.

After describing how world leaders like China’s Xi Jinping wrote him “beautiful” notes after the assassination attempt, Trump began riffing about bringing Kim Jong Un to a baseball game as a way to stop him from acquiring more nuclear weapons.

“Just relax, chill, you’ve got so much nuclear weapons (sic),” Trump told the crowd. “Let’s go to a baseball game. I’ll show you what a baseball game is. We’ll go watch the Yankees.”

It’s not clear Trump actually said any of this to the North Korean leader, but that’s probably beside the point for this crowd, who is laughing along with the former president regardless.

Donald Trump has spent a considerable amount of time during his Michigan speech today bashing electric vehicles — be they boats, military hardware, or consumer cars and trucks — even as he praised Tesla co-founder Elon Musk for his support and considerable political donations to the Trump 2024 effort.

Watch his full remarks below.

Not surprisingly, Trump began his remarks at a Michigan campaign rally on Thursday by mocking the chaos in the Democratic party over whether Joe Biden will continue to be the candidate in 2024.

“They have no idea who their candidate is, and neither do we,” Trump said, before moving on to conduct a faux straw poll in the audience over who the Dems should pick and mocking vice-president Kamala Harris and Mitchigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, both of whom have been discussed as potential replacements.

“I don’t know what the hell it is…They’re seriously extreme, but I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it,” Trump said. “But what they do is misinformation, and they keep saying he’s a threat to democracy. The hell did I do with democracy? Last I took a bullet for democracy.”