Harris campaign slams Trump for planning rally in Michigan town with long ties to KKK

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox

Get our free Inside Washington email

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

Kamala Harris’s campaign has slammed Donald Trump for planning a rally in a Michigan town with long ties to the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists.

Trump’s campaign announced his return to Michigan this upcoming Tuesday with an event in Howell, a city of roughly 10,000 residents with long, storied links to the racist mob – which openly held events north of the town throughout the 1970s and even sporadically into the present era.

Pro-KKK graffiti was reportedly found in the town as recently as 2021 – and white supremacists staged a rally there just last month.

On Saturday, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign savaged the Republican ticket’s choice of venue arguing that Trump is making an appeal to the white nationalists who marched against Jews and other minorities in Charlottesville in 2017 – a moment which led to Trump controversially praising demonstrators and counterprotesters at a press conference.

“The racists and white supremacists who marched in Trump’s name last month in Howell have all watched him praise Hitler, defend neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, and tell far-right extremists to ‘stand back and stand by.’ Trump’s actions have encouraged them, and Michiganders can expect more of the same when he comes to town next week,” the Michigan communications director for the Harris campaign, Alyssa Bradley, told The Washington Post.

Trump’s campaign fired back in a statement to the Post calling Harris’s spokesperson’s comments “absurd” and noting that Biden himself spoke in Howell, Michigan, as recently as 2021. At the time, Republicans in the state correctly noted that the incumbent president had visited the district in order to boost the campaign of Elissa Slotkin, a rising star in the Michigan Democratic party whose US House district encompasses Howell. She went on to win her bid for reelection the next year.

Michigan is known as a battleground state but is also considered part of the so-called “blue wall” — a group of blue-leaning battleground states which have been won by Democrats in successive elections. The state broke for Trump in 2016, however, contributing to Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

“President Trump will travel to Howell to deliver a strong message on law and order, making it clear that crime, violence, and hate of any form will have zero place in our country when he is back in the White House,” said Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary.

Harris’s campaign has been going in on Trump as the former president seeks to recapture his momentum in the 2024 presidential race and counter Harris’s own surge of support among Democrats and independents.

As Trump returns to battleground states ahead of the Democratic National Convention this week, where his rival will be coronated as the party’s nominee, Harris’s campaign is making clear that they plan to paint the former president’s every move as divisive and a kind of dogwhistle to the far-right of his party whose shadow Trump has sought to escape for weeks.

It’s a line of attack that exemplifies the new sharper and more aggressive tone that Kamala Harris has oriented her campaign around since assuming the role of the party’s presumptive nominee in mid-July. The marked change in tenor of Harris’s campaign following Joe Biden’s departure from the race has been met by Democrats with a collective sigh of relief, as her party for weeks had grown despondent over Biden’s apparent total inability to effectively make the case against Trump.

But it’s also one that has been marked by an internal adjustment for her campaign, which over the past month has had to quickly evolve from a vessel aimed at selling Biden’s legacy to one shaped around presenting Harris as an anti-Trump champion ready to build on Biden’s work with an agenda of her own. That’s meant some growing pains as hangers-on from Bidenworld have reportedly struggled to acclimate themselves to a younger, more ambitious candidate.

CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reported on some of those internal dynamics clashing in an article on Sunday examining the sudden evolution of the Biden-to-Harris campaign, which revealed among other points that one of Biden’s top advisors had urged Harris against continuing to pursue two lines of attack against the Trump ticket — the assertion that Trump’s running mate and his views about women are “weird”, and the succinct attack line that has become a chant at Harris’s rallies, “we’re not going back”.

Both have been widely recognized by those following the race and voters closely as more effective messages than anything the Biden campaign had come up with over the past six months.