Donald Trump’s rambling speech at the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday at times veered so far off-topic that critics raised new questions about his focus and mental capacity.
Trump trashed Detroit while speaking in Detroit, attempted to define the word “grocery,” and got defensive about his crowd size as he spoke for three hours.
During one 90-second stretch, he jumped from manufacturing to Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets, to President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign amid COVID restrictions, to election conspiracy theories, and then to how the United States has been “abused” by other countries.
“It’s so simple,” Trump said of his proposals to use the threat of tariffs to increase manufacturing in the United States.
“This isn’t like Elon, with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they want it to land or he gets the engines back,” he said. “That was the first, I really, I said ‘who the hell did that.’ I saw engines about three, four years ago. These things were coming, cylinders, no wings, no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace with a circle. Boom!”
The word “circle” set Trump in a new direction.
“Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?” Trump said, referring to circles placed on the ground in 2020 to help guests keep socially distant amid the raging COVID-19 pandemic. “He’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill ’em up.”
Trump then used that to launch into his grievances about the 2020 election, which he lost, and make references to his debunked conspiracy theories.
“But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote, I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the eight circles,” Trump said, then riffed some more:
“I always loved those circles, they were so beautiful, they were so beautiful to look at. In fact the person that did them, that was the best thing about his, the level of that circle was great, but they couldn’t get people so they used to have the press stand in those circles because they couldn’t get the people. Then I heard we lost. ‘Oh we lost.’ No, we’re never going to let that happen again. But we’ve been abused by other countries we’ve been abused by our own politicians really, more than other countries.”
When he was still running against Biden, Trump accused his rival of cognitive problems and challenged him to take a cognitive test.
Now, however, critics are raising those same questions about Trump ― and many were baffled and alarmed by the stream-of-consciousness turn in his latest speech: