Former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), appear together on stage at a joint campaign rally at the Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Saturday, July 20, 2024. (Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times)
By MICHAEL GOLD AND SIMON J. LEVIEN
At his first campaign rally since he survived an assassination attempt last week, former President Donald Trump on Saturday launched a litany of attacks that suggested his call for national unity in the wake of the shooting had faded entirely into the background.
Over the course of an almost two-hour speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump insulted President Joe Biden’s intelligence repeatedly, calling him “stupid” more than once. He said Vice President Kamala Harris was “crazy” and gleefully jeered the Democratic Party’s infighting over Biden’s political future.
Even as Trump made numerous false claims accusing his political opponents of widespread election fraud, he presented the continuing push by some Democrats to replace Biden on their ticket as an antidemocratic effort.
By contrast, Trump — who falsely insisted he won the 2020 election and whose effort to overturn it spurred a violent attack on the Capitol that threatened the peaceful transfer of power — presented himself as an almost martyr trying to protect the United States from its downfall.
“They keep saying, ‘He’s a threat to democracy,’” Trump told the crowd of thousands inside the Van Andel Arena. “I’m saying, ‘What the hell did I do with democracy’? Last week, I took a bullet for democracy.”
The line — one of the few additions to a speech that culled from Trump’s standard rally repertoire — came as Trump was trying to rebut Democrats’ claims that he was an extremist and distance himself from Project 2025, a set of conservative policy proposals for a potential second term that would overhaul the federal government.
The Biden campaign has repeatedly tried to tie Trump to the effort, which has involved Trump allies and former advisers. But Trump on Saturday criticized the project as the work of the “radical right,” even as he acknowledged that he knew some of those involved.
“They’re seriously extreme, but I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said of Project 2025 — which he kept calling “Project 25,” even as he has previously referred to it by its full name.
Saturday’s speech was the latest signal that the assassination attempt on Trump had done little to change his political message. Though his closing convention speech Thursday opened with a somber call for unity, he reverted quickly to standard rally repertoire, including an aside comparing himself to the gangster Al Capone and a discursive tangent regarding sharks and electric boats.
Trump did discuss the assassination attempt, in which his ear was struck by a bullet at a rally last week in Butler, Pennsylvania, even though he said Thursday that after his convention speech he would not describe it in detail again.
Sporting a light brown bandage on his ear, smaller than the large white gauze he had been wearing, Trump once again cited divine intervention, telling the crowd, “I shouldn’t here.” He offered praise for Corey Comperatore, a volunteer firefighter and rally attendee who was killed in the gunfire, and thanked officials in Butler for their efforts.
But where Trump was somber and visibly affected in front of the Republican delegates and national network cameras, a moment of seeming vulnerability, on Saturday he at times struck a somewhat lighter tone discussing the shooting.
At one point, referring to a screen showing a chart on immigration that he was pointing to when the shooting began, Trump joked that “I owe immigration” my life and that the “sign was very good — I think I’m going to sleep with it tonight.”
Before Trump spoke, his newly chosen running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, took the stage and marveled at the former president’s resilience.
“I find it hard to believe that a week ago an assassin tried to take Donald Trump’s life, and now we have a hell of a crowd to welcome him back on the campaign trail,” Vance said, in his first joint rally with Trump since he joined the Republican ticket.
Though the security procedures at the rally were largely unchanged from past Trump rallies, the venue was held indoors after the Trump campaign had largely held events outdoors. There was a heavier police presence than typical inside and outside the building.
Sean Solano, a 22-year-old missionary to Nicaragua, said he had taken one extra precaution in light of the shooting.
“On Wednesday, I prayed over the building,” Solano, of Cutlerville, Michigan, said about the rally’s venue. Echoing several other rally attendees who spoke of Trump’s survival in religious terms, Solano added that he thought God had given the former president a chance, and now Trump would “fight with fury like never before.”
Trump’s dark message about the pernicious threat to the country posed by immigrants entering the country illegally, Democrats and foreign adversaries, a signature theme from previous rallies, was largely intact. He broadly characterized those crossing the border as “prisoners and people from mental institutions,” whom he again likened to the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter. And he promised once more the largest deportation operation in U.S. history if elected.
Trump also joyously mocked Democrats as they contended with the viability of Biden’s place as the party’s presidential nominee. Trump called his rivals “the enemies of democracy” because Democrats who call for Biden’s replacement would have to answer to the millions of primary votes the president secured over other candidates.
“They have no idea who their candidate is, and neither do we. That’s a problem,” Trump said in a tone that suggested he thought anything but.
Building on months of attacking Democrats as a threat to democracy, usually based on his false insistence that Biden has directed all four criminal cases against him, he argued once more that it was his political opponents who were antidemocratic.
“This guy goes, and he gets the votes, and now we’ll take it away,” Trump scoffed. “That’s democracy.”
Still, Trump showed little sympathy for Biden. After mostly, though not entirely, avoiding direct personal attacks against the president in his convention speech, Trump repeatedly called him unintelligent, saying that he had a low IQ compared with other world leaders and that he was incompetent.
He widened his focus to include Harris, insulting her laugh and calling her “nuts.” He similarly called Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, “crazy,” and then mocked her over her having privately told Biden that he might not win in November, which he characterized as a sudden display of disloyalty.
“Crazy Nancy,” Trump said. “Did you see Nancy Pelosi is selling out Biden now? Did you see she turned on him like a dog?”
Republicans, he pointed out, were unified largely behind him. As evidence, Trump ceded the stage to a display of party unity: Sandy Pensler, a Republican running in Michigan’s Senate primary, took the stage to end his bid and endorse his Trump-endorsed rival, Rep. Mike Rogers.
“Unifying the party,” Trump said as he took back the microphone, “it’s beautiful to watch.”
Michigan is seen as a critical battleground state for Trump and Biden in November. It is one of several that Trump won in 2016 only to lose to Biden four years later.
The decision to hold Trump’s first joint rally with Vance in the state offered another signal of its electoral importance. Trump, when he announced Vance’s selection, singled out his ability to win over workers in the state, and Vance several times in his convention speech mentioned working-class people in Michigan as crucial to the nation.
Vance gave a well-received 13-minute speech — a fraction of Trump’s lengthy remarks — more than an hour before Trump took the stage. He returned later to introduce the former president to raucous applause, and the two embraced in front of the crowd.
“I chose him because he’s for the worker,” Trump said after Vance left the stage. “He’s for the people that work so hard and perhaps weren’t treated like they should have been.”
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