At the intersection of Rawsonville and Textile Roads, on a slender stretch of turf that runs the length of a half-deserted strip mall, Kathryn Prater and Kelra Rise are dancing.
The longtime friends, white women in their early 40s, haven’t had much to celebrate recently. Rise lost her job as a shipping clerk two months ago and is now uninsured and struggling to get by; Prater, a school bus driver, will receive her final paycheck in two weeks with no obvious prospect of income thereafter. Their pain is representative of Michigan on the whole, a state battered by Covid-19 to the tune of 5,000 deaths; a state crushed under the weight of a 22 percent unemployment rate; and now, a state reeling from a 500-year flood in mid-Michigan that has displaced tens of thousands of people. If America has a headache, Michigan has a migraine.
But in this moment, none of it matters. For the masses gathered on the side of the road, the sight of a presidential motorcade—and the knowledge that Donald Trump himself has come to their backyard, to visit the local Ford plant and pay homage to the old “Arsenal of Democracy”—is sufficient to distract from the suffering of the day. Country music blares from the back of a parked pickup truck. Giddy customers fork over $5 bills and pull MAGA shirts over their outfits. One man hoists a Betsy Ross-era flag from his fishing pole, with a naked brunette doll—“Governor Half-Whit!” he cries, echoing a presidential putdown—dangling from a noose.
[…]
[E]ven as Trump stuck predominantly to the script on Thursday, portraying himself as the fireman who had ventured into a state smoldering with rage and anxiety, the scent of kerosene followed close behind. Just 24 hours before he arrived in Michigan, the president launched a dangerous disinformation campaign, accusing the secretary of state of going “rogue” by illegally sending absentee ballots to every Michigan voter. He threatened to block funding to Michigan—a state beleaguered by multiple converging disasters, including one that was unfolding just as the tweet was sent—“if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!”
To be clear, none of this is accurate. Voters were sent applications to vote absentee, a practice consistent with a newly adopted Michigan law (a law that exists in other states, red and blue alike). The Michigan GOP has itself sent out applications. There is nothing sordid or illegitimate going on; both parties here understand the rules of the game and are attempting to master them before November.
But Trump is playing his own game. Ever in need of a foil—be it Barack Obama’s birth certificate, John McCain, Megyn Kelly, Low Energy Jeb, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Crooked Hillary, the Deep State, Never Trumpers, Sleepy Joe, Obamagate, or combinations thereof—the president has set his sights on the institution of the ballot box. The benefit is twofold: Trump can simultaneously incite the distress of his base to juice enthusiasm come November while establishing a built-in justification should he lose.
The effects are already manifest. In conversation after conversation with voters here Thursday, Trump supporters repeatedly—and completely unsolicited—say Democrats are attempting to steal the election from the president.
“I lived in Chicago for six years. We know how Mayor Daley stuffed the ballot box for JFK against Nixon.” says Keith Brudder, a 72-year-old landscape contractor from the nearby town of Willis. “That’s what the Democrats in charge here want to do, with this mail-in voting. There’s just no way to have accountability for those ballots like you do when people come to the voting booth.”
“In Wayne County alone, more than a million people who weren’t registered to vote in 2018 got to vote anyway, and that’s how Whitmer and these Democrats got elected,” says Matthew Shepard, a retired career military man who drove his hulking, orange paramilitary-style truck 90 minutes south from Shiawassee County to cheer on the president. (He offered no documentation for those statistics.) “That’s the only way Trump loses this election—this mail voting scam.”
Deborah Fuqua-Frey, who sits on the board of the Washtenaw County GOP and helped organize the pro-Trump rally here, says the United Auto Workers union “controls the outcome of the 2020 election.” And that terrifies her. “Because nobody knows how to stuff the ballot box like the UAW,” she says. “Trust me, I was a third-generation UAW member, and I know they’re always looking for new ways to cheat. That’s what they’re going to do with the mail system.”
You will notice that this crowd is pretty sparse. I doubt they represent more than a handful of Americans. But it does show that Trump is getting his message across. If he wins it’s a sign of his magnificent electoral prowess. If he loses, the game was rigged.
He’s already on the record with this. From 2016: