Former President Donald Trump—speaking in Detroit to a crowd of Detroiters—characterized the Motor City as a “decimated” ruin that looked “a hell of a lot more” like the developing world “than most places in China.” If Vice President Kamala Harris is elected, he warned, “our whole country will end up being like Detroit.”
Trump’s remarks to the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday—which also took aim at the “once great city’s” “abandoned” homes, “crumbling” hotels and fleeing young people—predictably did not sit well with local leaders and, notably, the president and CEO of the economic club, who said Detroit was, in fact, “doing really, really well right now.”
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan in a video posted to Instagram: “The best thing that happened to Detroit was when Donald Trump left office and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris came in and gave us real partners.”
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was more to the point: “Keep Detroit out of your mouth,” she wrote Thursday on X.
Both Democrats were quick to point out that, contrary Trump’s dystopian vision of Detroit, the city has actually been on an economic and demographic upswing since filing for bankruptcy in 2013. Its population, home values, and employment numbers are all rising again, Bridge Michigan reports, and, over the past year, wage growth in southeast Michigan has well outpaced the national average.
Still, Trump rarely misses an opportunity to disparage an urban center, even in swing states he hopes to win. He reportedly called Milwaukee, Wisconsin, “a horrible city” earlier this year—a diss he has since sought to walk back. He has also described Portland, Oregon, as a “burned down hulk of a city,” New York as a “city in decline” and Atlanta as a “killing field.” In a 2020 town hall on Fox News, Trump claimed that Detroit, Oakland, and Baltimore suffered from worse violence than cities in Guatemala and Honduras. “These cities, it’s like living in hell,” he said.
During his remarks on Thursday, Trump also accused Harris of “destroying” San Francisco, a city he had previously called “worse than a slum” and “not even livable.” Not coincidentally, fewer than 13% of San Francisco voters cast their ballots for Trump in the 2020 presidential election. His showing in Detroit that year was even weaker, at just 3.49%.
Speaking in Macomb County, Michigan, on Friday, Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, defended the Motor City and fired back at Trump. “The city’s growing, crime’s down and factories are opening up,” he said. “But those guys, all’s they know about manufacturing is manufacturing bullshit.”
