It took 46 minutes for President Donald Trump to mention the name of the man he’d come to stump for as he delivered a bizarre, seemingly-endless rant in which he told a crowd of autoworkers he’d done more for them than the people who’d given birth to them or raised them.
The president was in the Wolverine State to campaign for former Representative Mike Rogers, who is running opposed for the Republican nomination in this year’s open Senate race. Rogers, a former FBI Special Agent, is expected to be in a close race against the winner of the hotly-contested Democratic primary between Rep. Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed.
But before Trump could bring Rogers on stage at the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan, he clearly had things he wanted off his chest.
He claimed Michigan’s autoworkers had been “sold out and betrayed by globalist politicians and corrupt special interests” for decades before he came into office and raised import taxes on many of the auto parts used by manufacturers in an increasingly integrated global economy and took aim at the head of the United Auto Workers union, Shawn Fain.
“This guy was bad news. I never spoke to him. Never saw him,” Trump said as he attacked Fain as “a Democrat” and claimed there’d be “no auto industry” had he not been reelected in 2024.
“I don’t know what happened to the guy. Somebody said he got fired,” Trump added.
Fain, an electrician by trade, remains the president of the UAW and has served in that role since 2023.
But Trump, who dismissed the UAW endorsement of his former opponents, noted that “the people that count” love him.
“Those people love Trump because I’ve done more for you than your parents. Okay, your parents are good. I’m not going to knock your parents, but I have been better to you than your parents. That I can tell you,” he said.
The bizarre remark, delivered just nine minutes into what had been touted as an official White House speech on the economy but appeared more like a garden-variety political rally, was just the opening salvo in a stem-winding address that touched on familiar grievances and treaded well-worn political talking points while offering little in the way of new policy announcements or reasons for voters to elect Rogers in a year Democrats are heavily favored to take control of the House and have an outside chance of seizing control of the Senate as well.
As he made his way through a combination of prepared remarks and off-teleprompter free-association, Trump polled the crowd about the best nickname for former president Joe Biden, complained about autoworkers’ support for former president Barack Obama, and bashed the electric vehicle sector on which Detroit had hoped to retain dominance in the American auto sector before his administration slashed support for the next-generation cars at the behest of the petroleum industry.
Finally, nearly an hour into his remarks, he began rattling off a list of candidates for office in Michigan, including Rogers, and invited him to speak for a few minutes while he took a break.
Rogers thanked him effusively and promised Trump that he’d vote for the election restriction bill he has spent months demanding from the Senate despite there not being enough support for the bill in the upper chamber to pass.
Trump’s meandering hour-long speech in Michigan came just days after his similarly-long rant at the White House Correspondents’ Association’s second attempt at an annual fundraising dinner devolved into an ugly display of insults that left the crowd of journalists stone-faced to an extent that led the president to lash out at his own speechwriters for giving him a “frickin’ stupid speech” to deliver to the gathering.
He used the opportunity to lash out at some of the very reporters with whom he’d shaken hands moments ago as they were presented awards for their coverage of him and his administration, taking most direct aim at CNN anchor and White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins by repeating his frequent demand that she smile more when she covers him and comparing her unfavorably to transgender influencer and former Book of Mormon performer Dylan Mulvaney.
The comments were the latest in the president’s long history of singling out female journalists, whom he has previously compared to pigs and called stupid in remarks that critics accuse of being highly sexist.
Trump attacked other journalists over the course of the speech, too, branding CNN’s Jake Tapper “Fake Tapper,” while claiming the Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey, one of the night’s award winners, was “unhireable.”
But he returned to his fixation on Collins just days later when he kicked off a Sunday Truth Social posting spree with AI-generated images of Mulvaney’s body in a controversial beer ad from three years ago — with the CNN anchor’s face pasted onto it.
The original image was of Mulvaney during her partnership with Bud Light in 2023, and was widely circulated online at the time during the backlash. Trump did not write anything along with the image and he did not explain the comparison.
CNN’s chief executive officer, Sir Mark Thompson, defended Collins and her colleagues in a statement released almost immediately during Trump’s Friday speech.
“We stand by our journalists and the integrity and fair-mindedness with which the CNN team reports the news,” he said.
“Honest, accurate journalism may sometimes irritate politicians, but our right to report and present that reporting to the public without government interference is fully protected by the U.S. Constitution.”
