The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman on Thursday explained why she thinks former President Donald Trump trashed Detroit during an address in the city.
Republican presidential nominee Trump, in a speech at the Detroit Economic Club, leaned into his divisive rhetoric once again when he fearmongered that the United States “will end up being like Detroit” if his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, wins the 2024 election.
“The whole country’s going to be like — you want to know the truth?” he asked. “It’ll be like Detroit. Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”
CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Haberman, who has reported on Trump for years, just why the ex-president would put down the same place where he was speaking.
Haberman replied, “I think he was appealing to the people in that room who were a group of largely white businessmen, as I understand it. You could hear there was applause when he said the line.”
But Haberman acknowledged, “This is going to appear in local news outside of that room, and insulting the city that you are in, especially one with a large number of Black voters, is not usually a prescription that gets made for candidates.”
“We’ll see if it matters to him. He’s been saying things like this for a very long time about various communities that he goes into,” she continued. “It hasn’t always mattered but it can have a cumulative effect especially in races that are very tight.”
“It’s certainly not something that I think his advisers would have liked that he said. I think calling it a developing nation was something that you will see, again, used by his opponents,” added Haberman.
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