Even by Donald Trump’s usual standards, this week has been crazy.
The Republican presidential candidate continued with boisterous, racist rants against women and immigrants, denigrated one of the largest black-majority cities in the US, threatened news networks with retaliation and spread falsehoods about crucial aid to people devastated by successive hurricanes that struck several states destroyed.
The former president flooded the zone with so many ridiculous and offensive things that individual comments struggled to cut through the noise. Some Republicans pushed back against some of the most outrageous lies without calling out Trump, while the overwhelming amount of waste forced the media to move on.
But for all its digressions and efforts to stay on message, the presidential race remains extremely close 24 days before Election Day. Trump is statistically tied with Vice President Kamala Harris polls of critical battleground states that will determine the winner of the November vote.
Trump started the week by sharing a xenophobic and false theory that immigrants are genetically predisposed to commit violent crimes, his latest attack on the group as he plans the largest-ever deportation operation of undocumented immigrants in American history.
“Many of them have killed far more than one person, and they are now living happily in the United States,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday about migrants with criminal records crossing the US-Mexico border. “You know, now that I’m a murderer, I believe this is in their genes. And we have a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
Trump has long used hostile rhetoric against immigrants. Last year, for example, he said migrants were “poisoning the blood of America,” dehumanizing language first used by dictator Adolf Hitler in Germany. He also defended them on Thursday rapistsa claim he first made when he launched his 2016 presidential campaign.
“That’s right, I used the word ‘rape.’ They raped our country,” said Trump, who was himself held legally liable for sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll, said of migrants during a speech at the Detroit Economic Club.
Research indicates that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens, and that is true no correlation bbetween an increase in the number of undocumented people and an increase in crime.
Trump took action bizarre tangents during the same address, which had twohour, discussing the economy, the cost of living and the price of groceries.
“I have more complaints about the groceries,” he said. “The word ‘grocer.’ You know, it’s a very simple word, but it means something like everything you eat. The stomach speaks. It always does. And I have more complaints about that. Bacon and the like are going up.”
Later, for some reason, he went into great detail about paper clips, likening his new plan to make car loan interest tax deductible to the invention of an object that holds paper together.
“It looks like the paper clip,” Trump said. “Someone comes with the paper clip and everyone says, ‘Why the hell didn’t I think of that?’ Someone invented the paperclip; I think a lot of money was made from it.”
The tax cut proposal – his last targeting a specific voting group, namely people in Michigan who make cars — follows others from the former president who are trying to cut taxes on tips, Social Security benefits and overtime.
“This will boost massive domestic auto production and make car ownership dramatically more affordable for millions of working American families,” Trump said in Detroit.
However, most Americans are unlikely to benefit from such a deduction. The average new car owner pays about $3,300 in interest annually, meaning it would still be more beneficial to claim the standard deduction, which is worth more than $27,000 and used by 90% of households.
To top it all off, Trump belittled the city where he spoke, a stronghold with a majority of black Democrats, by claiming that the entire country will look like Detroit if Harris wins, and implying that this would be a bad thing.
‘The whole country will say: do you want to know the truth? It will be like Detroit,” Trump said. “Our whole country will end up looking like Detroit if she’s your president.”
The night before his appearance at the Detroit Economic Club, Trump raged against CBS News on his social media website, Truth Social, demanding that the century-old network and all other TV news channels lose their broadcast licenses after CBS’ interview with Harris about his “60 Minutes” program, a decades-long tradition ahead of elections for presidential candidates from both parties.
He accused CBS of editing Harris’ interview to make her seem more “presidential” and to hide the fact that she is “virtually incoherent.” He also wrote that the network is “A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY,” despite initially agreeing to sit down for an interview himself last month. Last week, however, his campaign withdrew from the interview because, 60 Minutes said, it objected to the news program fact-checking his statements.
In another Truth Social post responding to Harris’ interview Tuesday on ABC’s “The View,” Trump called Harris a “dummy” and referred to the hosts as “degenerates” and “stupid women.”
The attacks on the show, whose viewership is majority female, may not help its standing with female voters, who have already been largely turned off by his rhetoric and role in America’s overturning of Roe v. Wade Supreme Court.
Also this week, Trump continued to lie about the federal government’s response to recent hurricanes, falsely claiming that storm victims would receive nothing more than a $750 stipend and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had run out of money. The untrue statements were part of a wave of conspiracy theories from pro-Trump voices on social media, essentially accusing the federal government of abandoning American citizens who had lost everything.
Mike Rothschild, author of a recent book on the history of conspiracy theories, said the right-wing response to the storm was an example of how Trump had changed not only the Republican Party but also the conspiracy theory ecosystem.
“What we’ve really seen in some of the hurricane cases is a real reversal of what conspiracyism used to be,” Rothschild told HuffPost. “Even going back to the late 1990s, it seemed like the government was coming to get you, they were going to take your guns. Now all these people are complaining that they’re not getting enough stuff from FEMA.
Trump suggested this week that FEMA had run out of money, mainly because the agency had spent it all on immigrants — a claim so untrue that several Republicans came out debunks it.
Former President Barack Obama also called out Trump for bullying and spreading lies about hurricane relief.
“I want to ask Republicans, people who are conservative, who didn’t vote for me… when did that become okay?” Obama asked Thursday as he searched for Harris in Pittsburgh. “Why would we go along with that? I mean, if your coworkers behaved like that, they wouldn’t be your coworkers for much longer.”
“The idea of deliberately misleading people in their most desperate and vulnerable moments – and my question is: when did that become okay?” he added.
