Former US President Donald Trump launched a full-scale attack on US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in his first rally after surviving an assassination attempt. The rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan came a week after the doomed rally in Pennsylvania, where he was shot in the ear.
In his first rally after the shocking incident and with his new running mate JD Vance, Trump appeared on stage with a white bandage on his ear. He started off his address by calling the assassination attempt on him “horrible”. “I shouldn’t be here, but let’s face it, something very special happened,” he remarked. The former president went on to state that “he owed his life to immigration” because he had turned his head to right toward a chart about border crossings fractionally before the bullet whizzed past his head, grazing his ear.
Trump slammed Biden and Harris. The business-mogul-turned politician went on to talk about the “leadership chaos” within the Democratic Party. “They have no idea who their candidate is, and neither do we,” Trump jibed and called Biden a “feeble old guy”. He went on to predict a landslide victory in the upcoming presidential elections and asked the crowd if they wanted him to run against US Vice President Kamala Harris or Biden. In another instance, he mentioned that he is happy to run against Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer who, he claimed has done “a terrible job”. In his speech, the former president hit the usual themes of electric vehicles, China and trade and promised a massive effort on deportation.
Trump distanced himself from Project 2025. Interestingly, Trump pushed back on accusations that a second Trump presidency would be influenced by the extremist manifesto Project 2025 from the conservative Heritage Foundation. He said that the document had been produced by the “severe right – very, very conservative and the opposite of the radical left. I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t want to know anything about it.”
The former president was preceded by the Ohio Senator who Trump picked as his running mate. During his address, Vance criticized both Republicans and Democrats for previously failing to protect manufacturing jobs in Michigan and the US. “Both parties were broken in very profound ways until Trump came along,” he said.
