Columnist David Smith says the closing message is ‘deranged and bizarre’
President Donald Trump told a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, on Sunday that Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is a “jihadist” who is “on the side of the terrorists” and would “have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate.” The remarks, reported by The Guardian’s David Smith in the paper’s weekly This Week in Trumpland column, also drew a comparison between stopping El-Sayed from entering the Senate chamber and the passengers who fought back against the hijackers aboard United flight 93, invoking the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. El-Sayed, who would become the first Muslim senator if elected, has been a target of Trump’s rhetoric during the midterm campaign.
The Port Huron speech was part of an effort in which Trump is averaging about a rally a day. Smith wrote that Trump is “fighting bad polls like a cornered animal” and asked whether any president’s closing message had ever been “downright deranged and bizarre.” Smith also wrote that there was “no evidence for any of this.”
Trump repeated other claims during the campaign about immigrants. One of the lines Smith described as a standard rally punchline is the assertion that 98% of people from Somalia in the US do not work for a living: “They don’t really have to work because they steal so much,” Trump said at one rally, adding, “They all have a Mercedes-Benz.” Smith called the assertion both racist and false. Speaking to what Smith described as his “overwhelmingly white fanbase,” Trump said: “Can you believe, low IQ, and they live better than you do? I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe they’re not as low as we think.”
Trump has also repeatedly attacked Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman of Minnesota, Smith wrote, and the Justice Department banged on her door at 6am to investigate alleged fraud in her family’s immigration paperwork. Omar said she is “confident in the fact that I didn’t do anything wrong.” Smith wrote that Trump was on “an Islamophobic tear.”
A separate set of rally remarks drew attention for a different reason. Trump said he looked at Ohio Sen. Jon Husted’s “ass” and then his “legs,” describing “a pile of muscle,” and said he had “fallen in love” with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott. At a rally in Michigan, he turned to the rapper Nicki Minaj: “I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before: Nicki Minaj,” he said. “That’s hard to miss. Stand up! That’s hard to miss.” Smith wrote that the objectification “is not limited to men.”
How the remarks land among Trump’s own supporters came through in an interview Smith conducted with Sharon Anderson, 70, of Etowah, Tennessee, who has been to 81 Trump rallies and attended her first in 2015. Asked whether she has concerns about the president’s mental health, she said: “Absolutely not! Do you know anyone that could do what he does? He speaks an hour and a half to an hour and 45 minutes every rally. It’s almost supernatural in my opinion.”
Asked about the remark concerning Nicki Minaj, Anderson said: “If a woman puts her ass out there for attention and somebody pays attention to it,” adding that “Trump didn’t try to rape her” and asking “what’s the big deal?” She said: “I’ve been doing this for 11 years. He’s not changed a bit in my opinion. Now, a lot of what he says is reported and a lot of what he says isn’t reported.”
Smith also reported that Trump, 80, has started making guttural sounds “somewhere between a burp and a hiccup” in the middle of a sentence, and that on Sunday he posted a 1,300-word rant on social media about his relationship with the comedian Bill Maher, branding him a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL LOSER” and telling him: “Bill: Don’t call anymore. It’s useless.”
Smith framed the contest as “Barack Obama versus Donald Trump,” calling it “the presidential election that never happened but has come to define an era of US politics.” While Trump has been on the trail, Barack Obama has returned to campaign for Democrats, drawing crowds that Smith said responded with shouts of “We love you!” At a rally in Detroit on Saturday, Obama asked the crowd, “What’s up with the gold?” and said: “he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Smith wrote that the line predictably set off a mini culture war over elitism and the tastefulness of chain restaurants.
Smith placed the current campaign in a longer arc, writing that Trump’s election to the White House 10 years ago next month “owed much to a racist backlash against America’s first Black president as white Christians shifted from majority to minority.” He noted that Trump pushed conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace and promised to build a border wall “to keep out criminals and rapists,” and that Trump still calls Obama by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, with emphasis on “Hussein.”
Smith’s judgment was that Obama might have the upper hand in the latest struggle between the two men, judged by the midterm polls that favor Democrats. He compared Trump’s position to Col Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, writing that the president may be “on a final descent into madness.”
The campaign’s own arithmetic is more concrete: Trump is averaging about a rally a day, he is 80, and two years remain in his term. Obama spoke to a crowd in Detroit on Saturday, and El-Sayed is running for the Senate in Michigan, where Trump held the Port Huron rally.