Even by the usual Donald Trump standards, this week was bonkers.
The Republican presidential nominee went on unhinged, racist rants against women and immigrants, denigrated one of the largest majority-Black cities in the US, threatened news networks with retaliation and spread falsehoods about critical assistance to people devastated by back-to-back hurricanes that ravaged several states.
The former president flooded the zone with so many ridiculous and offensive things that individual comments struggled to break through the noise. Some Republicans pushed back against a few of the most outrageous lies, without calling Trump out, while the overwhelming volume of garbage forced the media to move on.
Yet for all his digressions and struggles to stay on message, the presidential race remains extremely tight 24 days before Election Day. Trump is statistically tied with Vice President Kamala Harris in polls of critical battleground states that will determine the winner of November’s vote.
Trump began 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 US history.
“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday of migrants with criminal records who cross the US-Mexico border. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got 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, dehumanising language first used by dictator Adolf Hitler in Germany.
Research indicates that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native- born citizens and that there is no correlation between an increase in undocumented people and a rise in crime.
On Thursday, he used similar rhetoric. Amid rambling remarks that touched on voter ID laws, the right-wing bogeyman of illegal voting and the national border, he added that “big companies” have “come in” to “raid and rape our country,” then immediately doubled down on his use of the term “rape.”
“That’s right, I used the word ‘rape.’ They raped our country,” Trump, who was himself found legally liable for sexual abusing writer E. Jean Carroll, said during a speech at the Detroit Economic Club.
Trump veered into bizarre tangents during the same address, which ran two hours, as he discussed the economy, the cost of living and the price of groceries.
“I have more complaints on grocery,” he said. “The word ‘grocery.’ You know, it’s sorta simple word, but it sorta means like everything you eat. The stomach is speaking. It always does. And, uh, I have more complaints about that. Bacon and things going up.”
Later, he expounded at length about paper clips for some reason, comparing his new plan to make auto loan interest tax-deductible to the invention of an object that holds paper together.
“It’s like the paper clip,” Trump said. “Somebody comes up with the paper clip and everybody says, ‘Why the hell didn’t I think of that?’ Somebody came up with the paper clip; I guess it made a lot of money.”
The tax cut proposal ― his latest targeting a specific voting group, namely people in Michigan who make cars ― follows others from the former president seeking to cut taxes on tips, Social Security benefits and overtime pay.
“This will stimulate massive domestic auto production and make car ownership dramatically more affordable for millions and millions of working American families,” Trump said in Detroit.
Most Americans likely can’t benefit from such a deduction, however. The average new car owner pays about $3,300 in interest annually, meaning it would still be more advantageous to claim the standard deduction, which is worth more than $27,000 and is utilised by 90% of households.
To top it all off, Trump disparaged the city where he spoke, a majority-Black Democratic stronghold, by claiming the whole country will resemble Detroit if Harris wins and implying that would be a bad thing.
“The whole country is going to be like ― you want to know the truth? It’ll be like Detroit,” Trump said. “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president.”
The night before his appearance at the Detroit Economic Club, Trump went on a rage-filled rant on his social media website, Truth Social, against CBS News, demanding that the century-old network and all other TV news stations lose their broadcasting licenses following CBS’ interview with Harris on its 60 Minutes program, a pre-election tradition for presidential candidates of both parties stretching back decades.
He accused CBS of editing its interview with Harris to make her look “more Presidential” and conceal that she’s “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 pulled out of 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 on Tuesday on ABC’s The View, Trump called Harris a “dummy” and referred to the hosts as “degenerates” and “dumb women.”
The attacks against the show, whose viewership is majority female, may not help his standing with women voters, who are largely already turned off by his rhetoric and his role in the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Also this week, Trump continued to lie about the federal government’s response to recent hurricanes, falsely claiming 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 rash of conspiracy theories by pro-Trump voices on social media essentially accusing the federal government of abandoning American citizens who’d lost everything.
Mike Rothschild, author of a recent book about the history of conspiracy theories, said the right-wing reaction to the storm was an example of how Trump had altered not only the Republican Party but also the conspiracy theory ecosystem.
“What we’ve really seen with some of the hurricane stuff is a real inversion of how conspiracism used to be,” Rothschild told HuffPost. “Even going back to the late ’90s, the government was like coming to get you, they were going to take your guns away. 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 specifically because the agency had spent it all on immigrants — a claim so untrue that several Republicans came out to debunk it.
Former President Barack Obama also called Trump out for bullying and for spreading lies about hurricane relief efforts.
“I want to ask Republicans out there, people who are conservative, who didn’t vote for me ... when did that become OK?” Obama asked on Thursday as he stumped for Harris in Pittsburgh. “Why would we go along with that? I mean, if your co-workers acted like that, they wouldn’t be your co-workers very long.”
“The idea of intentionally trying to deceive people in their most desperate and vulnerable moments ― and my question is, when did that become OK?” he added.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly characterised Donald Trump’s comments on Thursday around the word “rape.” Trump used the word in regard to companies.