Trump tells Michigan auto workers, ‘I’ve done more for you than your parents’ in latest rambling speech

President riffs on everything except the hotly-contested Michigan Senate race in appearance at General Motors facility

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It took 46 minutes for President Donald Trump to mention the name of the man he’d come to stump for in Michigan on Monday as he delivered a bizarre, seemingly endless rant in which he at one point told the crowd of largely autoworkers that he’d done more for them than the people who raised them.

The president was in the Wolverine State to campaign for former Rep. Mike Rogers , who is running unopposed for the Republican nomination in this year’s open Senate race. Rogers, a former FBI agent, is expected to be in a close race against the winner of the hotly contested Democratic primary between Rep. Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed.

But before Trump could bring Rogers on stage at the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan , he clearly had things he wanted to get off his chest.

Trump claimed Michigan’s autoworkers had been “sold out and betrayed by globalist politicians and corrupt special interests” for decades before he came into office, neglecting to mention how he raised import taxes on many of the auto parts used by the car makers. Then he set his sights on the head of the United Auto Workers union, Shawn Fain.

“This guy was bad news. I never spoke to him. Never saw him,” Trump said as he attacked Fain as “a Democrat” and claimed there’d be “no auto industry” had he not been reelected in 2024.

“I don't know what happened to the guy. Somebody said he got fired,” Trump added.

Fain, an electrician by trade, remains the president of the UAW and has served in that role since 2023. But Trump, who dismissed the UAW endorsement of his former opponents, noted that “the people that count” love him.

“Those people love Trump because I've done more for you than your parents. OK, your parents are good. I'm not going to knock your parents, but I have been better to you than your parents. That I can tell you,” he said.

The bizarre remark, delivered just nine minutes into what had been touted as an official White House speech on the economy but appeared more like a garden-variety Trump political rally, was just the opening salvo in a stem-winding address that touched on familiar grievances and treaded well-worn political talking points while offering little in the way of new policy announcements or reasons for voters to elect Rogers in a year Democrats are heavily favored to take control of the House and have an outside chance of seizing control of the Senate as well.

And, in a year when Latino voters are expected to be a key swing voting bloc, he mocked the Spanish-language pronunciation of America’s largest trading partner as he recalled boasting to a group of donors about his vow to stop all trade from “Meh-hee-hoo.”

“So I said to a group the other day, and we will stop all business going to MEH-hee-ho and they didn't know what the hell I was talking about,” he said, after claiming someone had corrected — apparently incorrectly — his pronunciation of Mexico.

He repeated the mocking pronunciation of America’s southern neighbor several times more for good measure.

As he made his way through a combination of prepared remarks and off-teleprompter free-association, Trump polled the crowd about the best nickname for former President Joe Biden, complained about autoworkers’ support for former president Barack Obama, and bashed the electric vehicle sector on which Detroit had hoped to retain dominance in the American auto sector before his administration slashed support for the next-generation cars at the behest of the petroleum industry.

After declaring America’s auto industry “back” and praising the Wolverine State’s “great” GOP representatives, he needed attendees to tell him which way they preferred for him to mock his predecessor.

“Sleepy Joe Biden or Crooked Joe Biden? Let's go,” he said, exhorting the crowd to cheer for each option.

He also railed against Democratic candidates in races across the country, tagging the entire opposition party as “communists” who “don't want police and ... don’t want prisons.”

“We’re running against communists,” he said. “They want to take your houses, they want to do things that nobody’s ever done.”

Trump also mocked voter concerns over high prices that he hasn’t managed to ease due to his tariff policies and continued war against Iran, telling the auto workers that “affordability” was only a concern of “fake news.”

He promised that the U.S. would “have the greatest economy in the history of the country ... very soon.”

Finally, nearly an hour into his remarks, he began rattling off a list of candidates for office in Michigan, including Rogers, and invited him to speak for a few minutes while he took a break.

Rogers thanked him effusively and promised Trump that he’d vote for the election restriction bill he has spent months demanding from the Senate despite there not being enough support for the bill in the upper chamber to pass.

Trump’s meandering hour-long speech in Michigan came just days after his similarly-long rant at the White House Correspondents’ Association’s second attempt at an annual fundraising dinner devolved into an ugly display of insults that left the crowd of journalists stone-faced to an extent that led the president to lash out at his own speechwriters for giving him a “frickin’ stupid speech” to deliver to the gathering.

He used the opportunity to lash out at some of the very reporters with whom he’d shaken hands moments ago as they were presented awards for their coverage of him and his administration, taking most direct aim at CNN anchor and White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins by repeating his frequent demand that she smile more when she covers him and comparing her unfavorably to transgender influencer and former Book of Mormon performer Dylan Mulvaney.

The comments were the latest in the president’s long histor...

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