Back to the heartland for US president Donald Trump to mark his 100 white-knuckle days in power; back to the fabled territory of Motor City itself and back to the place he loves most – behind the microphone, in front of his people at a live rally, slaloming his way through a 90-minute speech designed to leave the fact-checkers with migraine and the masses believing again.
Back to the future for the 47th president to project complete indifference to the slew of polls reflecting declining support and growing pessimism about the country. Listen hard enough and you might hear the jangly notes of Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer sounding from another century. Trump marked his milestone by doing what he has always done best: casting a spell on a segment of American society that has, for decades, been waiting for someone or something to believe in.
“I’m thrilled to be back in this beautiful state,” he told the Michiganders at his first official rally since assuming office.
“I love this state. And a lot of auto jobs coming. Watch what’s happening. The companies are coming in by ... the tens. You gotta see what’s happening. They all want to come back to Michigan and build cars again. And you know why? Because of our tax and tariff policy. They’re coming from all over the world, they’re coming up and they’re opening up plants and they are talking to us all day and all night. They want to get here and they are coming in at levels you’ve never seen before. And I want to thank the auto workers for your support. That was great.”
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For a venue Trump chose Warren, in Macomb County, as a symbol of the great rebirth of US manufacturing. On the fringes of Detroit, the city’s economy revolves around the 27,000 people who are employed by General Motors. He told those in the arena, in flagrant disregard of the nuisance opinion polls, that they were witnessing “the best 100-day start to any president in history and everyone is saying it”.
He paused to acknowledge familiar faces from last autumn’s series of tornado-rallies across the country. The Maga loyalist in the trademark brick suit was there. And then another salute. “There’s my friend. ‘Blacks For Trump.’ I like that guy. He follows me. Everyone thinks I pay you a fortune. I don’t even know who the hell he is. I just like him.”
He told his supporters that border crossings had fallen by “99.999 per cent”. He reminded them he was “getting the transgender insanity the hell out of our government”. And above all, he said, circling back to a promise he made over and over last year, “we are saving the American dream. We are making America great again, and it is happening fast too. What the world has witnessed in the past 14 weeks is a revolution of common sense. You’re conservative, you’re liberal, whatever the hell: it is about common sense”.
The speech and theatre of the evening was designed as a paean to the interior of the United States. It was scheduled for six o’clock eastern time. Trump spoke for 90 minutes. Easy to imagine the iPhone listeners out on the farm lands or on the commute home for work or preparing dinner for the evening. Much of the content had the familiar ease of a crooner running through his favourite hits. That wasn’t lost on Trump. At some point during a speech that moved from a celebration of self to a prosecution of “the radical left” and the usual lie about having won the 2020 election, it became obvious that Donald Trump realised how much he had missed all this.
And irrespective of what his bitterest Democratic critics think about the veracity of his message, they will be deluding themselves if they don’t acknowledge that when he is in the mood – and he was on Tuesday evening – he delivers these rallies with an uncanny magnetism that the Democrats have collectively failed to match. At one stage, Trump idly acknowledged that fact as he mused about the opposition’s predicament.
“Bernie [Sanders] is probably the best they have and he is about seven years older than me. But I’ll give him credit for one thing – he is still pretty sharp.”
He also took time to deliver a general warning to Republican members of Congress to stay in line when it comes to passing an upcoming bill that will include the tax cuts essential to his programme. The party, he warned, without naming names, still had one or two independent minds – or, as he called them, “grandstanders”.
“Not many. But remember who those grandstanders are and vote them the hell out of office.”
Long before his speech had finished, it had doubtlessly occurred to his chief of staff Susie Wiles and other strategists that future rallies of this kind are the way to go. Trump has packed the media into the Oval Office as a kind of surrogate live-crowd since January. But nothing beats this for him and with the Democrats in disarray, he can flay them again and again on prime time television.
The triumphalism in his predictions made for a jaw-dropping contrast with the public sentiments reflected in the polling numbers but on he went, selling the dream.
“From Marquette to Midland, from Mackinaw to Saginaw, and from Lansing to right here in Macomb County, we stand on the shoulders of patriots. What great people – I love you Michigan ... who laid the railroads, worked the factories, tilled the fields, forged the steel, fought the battles and won the victories that built the Motor City and made this state into the pride of the American Midwest. Michigan is the state that gave us the assembly line, Motown, Ford, General Motors, Chrysler and put the world behind the wheel of the automobile. And under our leadership we are making it greater every single day,” he told them.
The factories would soon bloom again. Inflation would end. Wages would rise, with the average take-home pay packet bumped by $5,000 per year.
The sceptics, the economists and Trump’s opponents will all explain with a combination of rhetoric and rationale why this simply cannot happen.
And sooner or later, the millions of Americans who voted for Trump will need to see the results of these bold promises. They will need proof – in their wallets or in the announcements of the returning car plants - that this is not the vision of a fabulist. The princes of Wall Street, who backed Trump in droves during the final weeks of the election, have already felt the bitter aftertaste of their decision: Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal editorial noted that these 100 days had been the worst for the Dow and S&P 500 since the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. A Washington Post/ABC poll reported on Tuesday that Trump has the lowest approval rating of any 100-day presidency in 80 years.
But in his second term as president, Trump has acquired a new indifference to the wellbeing of the market, and to opinion polls, and to all opposition. His sense of infallibility is understandable, after that mad year of trials and the rifle shots in Pennsylvania. Canadian fear and loathing of Trump’s tariff policy was instrumental in the election of Mark Carney as new prime minister on Monday night. Across the heartland of the United States, business owners and farmers are grappling with the terrifying forecasts of a full-on tariff war with China. On the news bulletins, the analysts continually warn of a recession on the horizon.
None of that seemed to bother the 47th president.
Through the din of applause, Trump stood up and told the US to ignore the doubters. Slogans posted around the arena advertised the coming of the Golden Age. There was no support cast on stage for this – no Elon prancing in his hat, no JD Vance.
This was about Donald Trump, and Trump alone. One hundred days out and he was in the mood to enjoy the view, and the adoration in the arena. Tomorrow, and the day after that, and the next 100, could wait.
