LANSING, Michigan (AP) — Former President Donald Trump is campaigning in Michigan and Wisconsin and is stepping up his travel to swing states ahead of the fall elections on the classic Labor Day holiday.
Trump is intensely focused on retaking states he won in 2016 but narrowly lost in 2020 as he continues to adjust to the reality of his modern race against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump’s first stop was Potterville, Michigan, near the state capital of Lansing, where he dramatically denounced the Biden administration over inflation, accusing Harris and President Joe Biden of leading “an economic reign of terror” and “committing one financial atrocity after another.”
“Kamala has made life unaffordable and unbearable for the middle class and I will make America affordable again,” he promised his supporters at Alro Steel.
Trump won Eaton County, where part of Lansing is located, in both 2016 and 2020, but by a smaller margin the second time around. The visit is his third to the state in the past nine days and his second this week, following a speech to the National Guard Association in Detroit on Monday.
He will later visit La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he will participate in a town hall meeting moderated by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who endorsed him in Detroit. It will be Trump’s first visit to Wisconsin since the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which ended three days before Biden withdrew from the race and made way for Harris.
These three Midwestern states, along with Pennsylvania, which Trump will visit on Friday, form a northern industrial bloc that Democrats held for two decades before Trump won them in 2016. Biden recaptured them in 2020 on his way to the White House.
Trump and his vice presidential candidate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, have taken swing states by storm in recent weeks, and Vance was in both states this week.
The visits come after Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, met for their first major television interview of their presidential campaign while the duo were on a bus tour of southeast Georgia.
Trump’s campaign team continues to face questions following a visit to Arlington Cemetery earlier this week. An Army spokesman said Thursday that an Arlington National Cemetery official was “abruptly pushed aside” during an altercation with Trump’s staff during a wreath-laying ceremony honoring soldiers killed during the withdrawal from the Afghanistan war.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said the team had obtained permission to have a photographer present during that portion of the visit and disparaged the cemetery official, saying he was apparently “suffering from a mental breakdown.”
Trump has struggled in recent weeks to prepare for his modern election campaign against Harris, whose candidacy has given modern momentum to the Democratic Party.
On Thursday, he again complained about the change and asked his audience: “Would you like to be me?”
Harris and Walz are looking to capitalize on growing enthusiasm among the party’s base since launching their campaign just over a month ago. They hope that enthusiasm – which was evident at the party’s convention in Chicago last week – will spread to more moderate areas as they embark on a two-day bus tour of Georgia, including events in rural southern parts of the state.
Trump’s events in Michigan and Wisconsin are both taking place in swing congressional districts.
Potterville is located in Michigan’s 7th District, which is made up of a mix of Republican-dominated counties like Clinton and Shiawassee and Democratic strongholds like Ingham, home to the state Capitol and Michigan State University. This district is expected to be one of the most competitive in the country this fall after incumbent Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin decided to run for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat.
La Crosse, meanwhile, is a hub in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, where Republican Derrick Van Orden narrowly won in 2022. Democrat Rebecca Cooke won the primary on August 13 and will run against him in November.
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Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.
