The soundtrack heralding President Donald Trump’s impending arrival at the Detroit Economic Club started, of all things, with Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” flooding the Motor City Casino’s Soundboard Theater at ear-splitting volume. Both the playlist and the volume, a worker told me, were controlled by the White House advance team.
The room was filling slowly; an hour earlier, the Econ Club panel scheduled before Trump’s visit was announced had discussed the club’s annual survey of the state’s 2026 economic outlook, in which Michiganders did not report positive feelings about Trump’s impact on the state’s economy.
That panel concluded, and staffers cleared the room ‒ for security reasons, a staffer explained ‒ and Econ Club members and their guests queued outside the theater filed in.
When Trump took the stage, promptly at 2 p.m. on Jan. 13, it was to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”; the president stood left of the podium for the full duration of the song, swaying gently, hands clasped and eyes uplifted, basking in applause that never quite swelled to thunder from a crowd that seemed divided about the main event. Some clapped with enthusiasm, laughing at the president’s punchlines; others, perhaps, there to bear witness.
Trump led with the old canard that the 2020 election was rigged, and his latest whopper: The 2024 election, in which he won Michigan, was rigged, but only in Michigan’s U.S. Senate election, which former Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers lost to Democratic U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin.
There’s no point in trying to fact-check a Trump speech. His staunchest supporters simply can’t be swayed, and his critics already know.
But listening to the president speak at length shows how much he benefits from editing; he segues from talking points and distorted headlines into a rambling monologue that rivaled the last words of Dutch Schultz for incoherence, then back into his scripted speech:
In the spotlight, playing to his supporters, Trump hit his familiar favorites, “Sleepy Joe Biden, a real dope,” to “an anti-tariff person is a pro-Chinese person,” a detour to the Panama Canal ‒ “we lost 36,000 people to the mosquito and a certain kind of snake, which was not a very nice reptile … the malaria, the mosquito and the snake” ‒ back to tariffs ‒ “my favorite word, they said I’ve never come here but I did, I got an award in Detroit … I said, ‘Tariff is my favorite word,’ they said, ‘what about your wife and children, what about religion and god,’ I said, ‘OK, it’s my fifth favorite word,’ the fake news hammered me … it’s my favorite word, my favorite word, and I got killed, I got killed” ‒ to his foes ‒ “the Democrats, they stick together, they don’t have the people we have, it’s a genetic thing, it’s something in the blood …”
Sitting in that room, listening to his raw harangue, it’s still startling that this man is president of the United States. And that in the first 13 days of this year, America has effectively colonized Venezuela, that an armed U.S. Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement fatally shot an unarmed citizen in Minneapolis while ICE continues to patrol the city’s streets, as protests rage ‒ “fake riots,” Trump called them Tuesday ‒ and the administration is halting child care and other aid to desperate families in Democratic states.
The Econ Club has a 93-year history of offering their forum to speakers of all political stripes, and nearly every U.S. president has addressed this group. There’s great value in that; presidents should be as accessible as possible to the people they are elected to serve.
But as protesters marched outside, two taken away in handcuffs; Trump threatening that ICE will not quit, that he plans to strangle support to impoverished Americans and deport immigrants in the thousands, that Venezuela may be merely the first, it’s surreal to sit in a warm, comfortable theater, business as usual for so many inside, juxtaposed against the chaos he’s created raging in the world outside.
Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Trump lied about the Michigan election in his Detroit visit | Opinion
Reporting by Nancy Kaffer, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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