Trump pushes tough-on-crime agenda in town with historic links to white extremism

By Helen Coster and Nathan Layne

HOWELL, Michigan (Reuters) -Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday attacked Democratic rival Kamala Harris' record on crime and safety, while brushing aside criticism from her campaign over holding an event in a Michigan town where white supremacists had rallied a month ago.

The campaign stop was one of a number Trump is holding this week in battleground states as Democrats meet in Chicago to formally choose Vice President Harris as their nominee in the Nov. 5 election.

But the event in Howell attracted particular attention because of the town's historic association with the Ku Klux Klan.

In the 1970s, Grand Dragon Robert Miles had a Howell mailing address and held meetings on a nearby farm. Last month, about a dozen white supremacists chanted "Heil Hitler" and carried "White Lives Matter" signs during a march through downtown Howell. According to local media, another group of demonstrators shouted, "We love Hitler, we love Trump" from a highway overpass outside town.

The Harris campaign had criticized Trump for planning the event in Howell while failing to condemn what it called a "blatant display of racism and antisemitism in his name." President Joe Biden visited Howell in 2021.

In an interview with Reuters after a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday, Trump did not directly respond to a question about that criticism. A Trump campaign spokesperson said the former president would make it clear in Howell that "crime, violence and hate of any form will have zero place in our country when he is back in the White House."

Trump did not speak out against hate during his 45-minute remarks on Tuesday.

When asked by a reporter afterward about the Harris campaign’s criticism of the location, he replied by asking “Who was here in 2021?” After the reporter said “Joe Biden,” Trump smiled and thanked her.

Trump has been criticized for racist remarks about Harris, who replaced Biden as the Democratic candidate and if elected in November would be the first Black woman and South Asian person to become president.

At a gathering of Black journalists last month, Trump falsely suggested Harris recently "turned Black" to advance her political career. He often insults her intelligence, her heritage and her looks. 

Last week, an official Trump campaign account on X posted two images side-by-side, one showing a pristine small-town American front porch with a flag and the other showing mostly Black migrants crowding outside a New York City hotel. The caption read: "Import the third world. Become the third world.”

The Trump War Room post drew fire from the NAACP civil rights group as racist, but Trump's aides stood by it. Trump has often suggested that the United States is facing an "invasion" of migrants across the southern border.

'WHY WOULDN'T THEY LIKE ME?'

Delivering his remarks in Howell flanked by local sheriffs against a backdrop of police vehicles, Trump repeated a campaign promise to close the border in an appeal to suburban women, a key demographic for both campaigns.

"I keep hearing about the suburban woman doesn't like Trump ... Why wouldn’t they like me?” he said. “I keep the suburbs safe. I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs."

The Trump campaign released prepared remarks ahead of the event that showed he would call for the death penalty for child rapists and child traffickers – part of his tough-on-crime platform in which he previously proposed the death penalty for human traffickers.

He did not announce that proposal in his remarks, nor another pledge in the prepared text to charge medical professionals with a felony crime if they perform surgery on a minor without parental consent.

A person familiar with the matter said Trump decided to save those announcements for after this week given the public's focus on the Democrats' convention.

Trump's visit to Howell one month after the white supremacist rally should not be viewed in a vacuum, said Nazita Lajevardi, an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University. 

"It begs the question: why there, why now?" Lajevardi said, noting that Howell is not populous. "The timing is important, the symbolism is important."

Trump campaign officials said they chose the location for the event, held at the Livingston County Sheriff's Office in Howell, in part because it would attract coverage by media outlets in Detroit, about 45 miles (72 km) away.

Trump won Michigan in 2016 and lost it in 2020. Some polls now show Harris edging ahead in the state in what is expected to be a close race.

Michael Murphy, the sheriff of Livingston County and a stalwart ally of Trump, said in an interview on Monday he suspected the Republican's campaign chose Howell because criminal activity has remained flat in Livingston County for about 15 years.

"It really gets me fired up when people try to turn anything in this county into racist or hate because that’s not us," Murphy said. "We can’t change the fact that at one time the grand dragon of the KKK lived in our county and unfortunately that's history, but history is just that - it's history."

(Reporting by Nathan Layne and Helen Coster; Additional reporting by David Shepherdson; Editing by Ross Colvin, Colleen Jenkins, Deepa Babington and Daniel Wallis)