Former President Donald J. Trump spoke out about his recent legal defeat against stone-cold supporters at a rally in Michigan on Saturday evening, a day after a New York judge sentenced him to pay a fine of nearly $355 million plus interest in his civil fraud case had.
The Republican front-runner for his party’s presidential nomination, Mr. Trump, denied that he conspired to manipulate his net worth, for which he was found liable by Judge Arthur F. Engoron in a ruling that could wipe out Mr. Trump’s entire cash stash.
“This judge is a lunatic,” he said in his opening salvo at his rally, held at an airport hangar in Oakland County, about 30 miles from Detroit.
Trump used a similar line of attack against New York Attorney General Letitia James, who accused him of exaggerating his wealth in the long-running case. The judge banned him from holding top positions at any New York company, including parts of his own Trump Organization, for three years. He slandered the justice system and said he was persecuted.
Mr. Trump’s visit to Michigan coincided with the first day of early, in-person voting in the state, which is the first time Republican Party contests have used both a primary and a caucus-style convention to honor delegates.
At the rally, the Trump campaign placed large signs urging supporters to take advantage of early voting.
“So you can do this or you can wait a little bit,” Trump mused to his supporters, many of whom lined up to attend for several hours in wind chills in the high single digits to low teens.
In his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, Michigan played an outsized role for Mr. Trump, who lost the state to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.
Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Democratic governor and Mr. Trump’s opponent, called the former president a divisive extremist on Saturday ahead of his visit there.
In a statement issued as part of the Biden campaign, she said: “Michigan did not buy what Donald Trump sold in 2020, and we will not in 2024.”
Mr. Trump’s embrace of early voting stood in stark contrast to his disdain in his previous campaigns, when he baselessly claimed it was a recipe for voter fraud.
“If we win Michigan, we will win the election,” Trump said at his rally. He later continued to spread falsehoods about voter fraud in the state. “We have to keep an eye on Detroit. They had more ballots than voters.”
The state Republican Party has descended into chaos, and this week two rival factions moved forward with plans to hold dueling caucuses on March 2, one in western Michigan and the other in Detroit.
Both groups have expressed their fierce loyalty to Mr. Trump, who, like the Republican National Committee, has made clear who he wants to lead the party in the key state: Pete Hoekstra, his former ambassador to the Netherlands and a former member of the House of Representatives.
“I said, ‘Can you get Hoekstra?'” Trump said of his support for the role.
But Kristina Karamo, a Trump-style election denier who has led the Michigan Republican Party for nearly a year, is clinging to power. She claims that the Jan. 6 vote by a group of state party leaders to remove her was unlawful, violating the RNC’s recognition of Mr. Hoekstra on Wednesday as her lawfully elected successor.
The power struggle drew unwanted headlines and headaches for Republicans in Michigan, where Mr. Trump held an average lead of about 60 percentage points over his last remaining rival in the nomination race, Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations.
Mr. Trump’s relatively unhindered march toward the nomination has belied the barrage of legal setbacks that surround him, both in the four criminal cases and other civil cases pending against him.
Perhaps the biggest penalty came Friday with the imposition of a civil fraud penalty that could top $450 million, plus interest. It also undermined Mr. Trump’s tirelessly curated image of his business empire and personal fortune, his calling card that propelled him to reality television stardom and then to the presidency in 2016.
That verdict, along with a jury’s recent $83.3 million verdict in a libel suit by writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused Mr. Trump of decades-long rape, could deplete the former president’s entire cash stash. (A jury had previously found him guilty of sexually assaulting Ms. Carroll.)
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2024-02-18 03:03:20
www.nytimes.com
