The latest faux controversy to envelop Donald Trump’s campaign has to do with the history of a small town in Michigan. The Democrats want to turn a Trump visit into a renewed debate about white supremacy.
If only they’d checked who’d visited before Trump did.
Howell, Michigan, is the county seat of Livingston County, which contains a not insignificant share of Detroit’s suburbs. That makes it key for both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris to carry the area if they want to win a state that has, over the past few election cycles, been decided by razor-thin margins.
The faux controversy comes out the fact that the town, once upon a time, was a hotbed for Ku Klux Klan members and rallies.
The last vestige of this, officially, was former Klan grand dragon Robert E. Miles — who, according to Reuters, had a mailing address in the town but lived outside of it.
He died in 1992, over 30 years ago, and most of the rallies he held in Howell were in the 1970s, roughly a half-century ago.
However, race controversies occasionally pop up in Howell, particularly with a new generation of racists that attaches a totemic value to it. Last month, a small group of neo-Nazis rallied in the small town — which naturally led Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) to lump Trump in with that. Reuters’ headline regarding the Tuesday visit, for instance: “Trump pushes tough-on-crime agenda in town with historic links to white extremism.”
This works just fine when it’s printed without adversarial comment, as these things are in the media. When the press decided to ask Trump about the Harris campaign’s contention that Trump’s visit was racially motivated, he had just one question for the reporter who raised the matter.
“Who was here in 2021?” he asked.
Will Trump win?
“Joe Biden,” the reporter said.
Trump proceeded to laugh. “Thank you. Thank you everybody.”
REPORTER: Kamala’s campaign attacked you for being in this town because it’s associated with white supremacy.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Who was here in 2021?
REPORTER: “Joe Biden”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Thank you.”
🖐️🎤 pic.twitter.com/QZQVDR9XK6
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 20, 2024
And with that five-word bomb — “Who was here in 2021?” — Harris’ campaign was duly owned.
As President Biden is fond of saying, true story. Unlike when Joe Biden uses those words, however, it was actually true this time — and you won’t be surprised to find out that the specter of white supremacy wasn’t really brought up when he visited Howell the first time, either.
Instead, the local Livingston Daily noted that “Biden talked about the bipartisan infrastructure bill and his Build Back Better plan” during his 2021 visit.
Now, of course, crime is one of the major issues of the 2024 campaign, just as big honking infrastructure bills were part of the Biden administration’s case for visiting the state in the first place.
Yet, the Harris campaign is blasting Trump for having the event while not donning a hairshirt over what it called a “blatant display of racism and antisemitism in his name.”
Okay, then — has Kamala talked to her current boss about apologizing for visiting Howell without self-flagellating about the town’s past history of bigotry? After all, she was perfectly happy calling Joe a racist on the debate stage before she was handed the vice presidency.
As noted previously, while the town has mostly shed its KKK-tinged past, incidents have popped up with some regularity in the years since. If this was a major concern for the Democrats, they could have simply avoided it as a spot for a rally, right?
They chose it for the same reason Donald Trump chose it: In a state that’s too close to call, winning Livingston County could mean winning the presidency. This had nothing to do with sating neo-Nazis — a group that’s small, rebarbative, and anathema to the beliefs of both major party candidates. Attempts to pretend otherwise will end just as poorly as this did.
