Donald Trump traveled to Michigan on Saturday for his first campaign appearance since being shot last week, and his first alongside his newly announced running mate JD Vance, the US senator for Ohio.
His ear may have been bandaged, but otherwise, Trump seemed little different than his old self, continuing to mock Democrats, lie about the 2020 election, demonize migrants in racist terms, praise right-wing dictators, and tell bizarre stories of dubious truthfulness.
Trump didn’t waste time in quickly addressing the recent assassination attempt.
“I stand before you only by the grace of almighty God,” he told the crowd in Grand Rapids. “I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here.”
“We will fight, fight, fight, and we will win, win win,” Trump added, a reference to when he held up his fist and chanted “fight” after being shot at in Pennsylvania last week.
Elsewhere, Trump described the shooting as the moment he “took a bullet for democracy.”
The former president then moved onto mocking the Democratic circus around whether Joe Biden will remain their 2024 presidential candidate.
“They have no idea who their candidate is, and neither do we,” Trump said. Elsewhere, he called Nancy Pelosi “crazy,” and accused her of turning on Joe Biden “like a dog,” after reports she privately told the president he should step aside and can’t beat Trump in November.
Trump seemed to be exceptionally confident in his campaign, even for someone who habitually boasts about himself.
At one point, he told a bizarre story about offering to take the leader of North Korea to a baseball game as a way to stop him from pursuing further nuclear weapons.
“Just relax, chill, you’ve got so much nuclear weapons,” Trump told the crowd. “Let’s go to a baseball game. I’ll show you what a baseball game is. We’ll go watch the Yankees.”
It wasn’t the only mention of a strong man: Trump also celebrated praise he has claimed he got from Hungarian far-right leader Viktor Orbán.
In fact, Trump was riding so high, he didn’t even seem worried about alienating one of his biggest, most influential recent backers: Elon Musk.
Trump praised the tech billionaire for the millions he’s given to the wider Trump re-election effort, then spent a significant chunk of his speech bashing electric cars, trucks, boats, military vehicles — anything that might one day become the kind of EV that the Tesla co-founder made his name building.
In between the jokes about Democrats and familiar, still-false claims that they “rigged” the 2020 election, Trump reserved special ire for migrants, describing them in ways that echoed the far-right “Great Replacement” theory.
“They wanna get people to vote,” Trump said of those who advocate for immigration to the US.
“This is an invasion of our country,” Trump added of migrants entering the US, people who he claimed were leading the “plunder, rape, and slaughter of our American suburbs and cities.”
In fact there’s no documented relationship between increased migration and crime, and studies suggest immigrants are less likely than those born in the US to break the law.
It wasn’t the only exaggerated claim of the night.
The former president also attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, a policy blueprint for his potential second term from a far-right think tank, despite his well-documented ties to its authors.
“I don’t know what the hell it is… They’re seriously extreme, but I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it,” Trump said. “But what they do is misinformation, and they keep saying he’s a threat to democracy. The hell did I do with democracy? Last week I took a bullet for democracy.”
Prior to Trump taking the stage, his new VP pick JD Vance warmed up the crowd, and bashed his Democratic counterpart Kamala Harris.
“What the hell have you done other than collect a check?” Vance asked during his speech, prompting the audience to burst into applause.