Donald Trump had no time to waste this Wednesday, the day he was given free from the New York court in which he faces criminal proceedings, the first against a former US president, for the payment to porn film star Stormy Daniels for buy your silence. It was the first time since the trial began that the Republican candidate, who is obliged by procedural law to sit in the dock every day, had time to campaign, so he did not give one rally, but two: the first, in the town of Waukesha, Wisconsin, and the second, at dusk, in Freeland, Michigan. Both stops are in the heart of two decisive states, and they promise to be the kind of scenarios in which the elections that will pit him against President Joe Biden will be resolved in November.
In the two places, separated by Lake Michigan, he took the opportunity to refer to the student protests that have taken over university campuses throughout the country against Israel’s war in Gaza and that in the early hours of this Wednesday led to an eviction in Columbia, as well about 300 arrests, while the University of Los Angeles recorded violent altercations. Trump invited the police to subdue these “angry lunatics, Hamas sympathizers.” “There are a lot of negative forces in this country,” he said in Wisconsin. “To college deans I recommend: eliminate the camps immediately, defeat the radicals and recover our campuses for all normal students who long for a safe place to learn,” added the Republican magnate.
The former president has used these protests these days to try to downplay the explosions of violence by the extreme right that defined the start of his mandate, especially the white supremacist march that left behind one death and 40 injured in Charlottesville. (Virginia) in the summer of 2017. The then tenant of the White House avoided condemning the neo-Nazis with a phrase that went down in history: “There were very good people on both sides,” he declared.
Trump arrived this Wednesday first at the Waukesha convention center, where a crowd was waiting for him, who, according to the Milwaukee media, queued for hours, eager to see with their own eyes in their small Midwestern city (70,000 inhabitants) one of the most famous men on the planet. He arrived in Wisconsin for the second time in a month, and he did so boosted by the polls: according to a local poll, he is two points ahead of Biden in that State six months before the elections. Waukesha County voted in 2020 Republican.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric
For an hour and a half, Trump gave one of his characteristic improvised speeches in which, however, the same themes, disconnected arguments and even jokes were repeated. He spoke about immigration and the current Administration’s management of the border with Mexico – “they arrive from the poorest countries with the highest crime rates in the world” -; He warned that Biden will raise taxes if he wins at the polls, and that this “will lead to the destruction of this country”; and he implied that Palestinian refugees resettled in the United States will bring “jihad.” This last argument led him to launch one of his favorite promises, that of organizing “the largest deportation in history.”
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He did not miss the opportunity to attack the judge of the case of Stormy Daniels Juan Merchan, who on Tuesday fined him $9,000 for contempt for nine comments on his social networks that, the judge considered, violated a gag order that he had issued. He also threatened him with a prison sentence if he decided to continue raping her.
“There is no crime. He is a corrupt judge. “Totally conflictive,” said the Republican candidate, who insisted on defining this process and the other three pending criminal proceedings as “electoral interference” maneuvers. This obligation of silence prohibits him from making public statements about witnesses, jurors and other people related to his case, but the accused is free to criticize Merchan, and he did so.
“I’m not allowed to talk about certain things; “It’s unprecedented,” he complained to his supporters in a tone different from that described by those attending the Manhattan court where he listens to witnesses every day with a mixture of irritation and apathy, an attitude that sometimes includes falling asleep in the dock of the accused.
When he had finished in Waukesha, the former president boarded his campaign plane, the Boeing 757 that he likes to call “Trump Force One”, heading to Freeland, in the center of the State of Michigan, where he gave the second rally of the afternoon to the feet of the stairs of the aircraft, with which he made one of his dramatic entrances on stage. Once again, the crowd was eagerly awaiting him.
The script of the second pass of the show. He defined the case of Stormy Daniels as “the Biden trial”; he expressed his desire to militarize the southern border; and he fantasized that none of the conflicts shaking the geopolitical table (Gaza and Ukraine) would have broken out if he were in charge. He also opened a window to what a second term will be like if he regains the keys to the White House in November, as he did in an interview published this week in the magazine Time. In it, the first with a written medium in a long time, he organized some of the ideas that sprinkle his rallies. And, again, he raised the specter of political violence if he does not win at the polls.