by Former President Donald J. Trump spoke of his latest legal defeat to frozen supporters at a rally in Michigan on Saturday night, a day after a New York judge fined him nearly $355 million plus interest on your civil fraud case.
Trump, the Republican front-runner for his party’s presidential nomination, denied conspiring to manipulate his net worth, for which he was found responsible by Judge Arthur F. Engoron in a ruling that could wipe out Trump’s entire cash hoard. .
“This judge is a lunatic,” he said in his opening speech at his rally, held inside an airport hangar in Oakland County, about 30 miles from Detroit.
Trump used a similar line of attack against Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, who accused him of exaggerating his wealth in the long-running case. The judge banned him for three years from holding senior positions at any New York company, including parts of his own Trump Organization, and Trump slandered the justice system and said he had been persecuted.
Trump’s visit to Michigan overlapped with the first day of early in-person voting in the state, which is using both a primary convention and caucus to award first-time delegates in GOP races.
At the rally, the Trump campaign put up large signs urging his supporters to take advantage of early voting.
“So you can do that or you can wait a little bit,” Trump mused to his supporters, many of whom had lined up for several hours amid freezing temperatures in the single digits to teens to attend.
In his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, Michigan played a huge role for Trump, who in 2020 lost the state to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Democratic governor and Trump rival, described the former president on Saturday as a divisive extremist ahead of his visit there.
In a statement issued through Biden’s campaign, he said, “Michigan didn’t buy what Donald Trump was selling in 2020, and we won’t in 2024.”
Trump’s embrace of early voting was a stark contrast to his disdain for it 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 subsequently continued to spread falsehoods about voter fraud in the state. “We have to keep an eye on Detroit. “They had more votes than voters.”
The state Republican Party has been consumed by chaos, and this week two rival factions moved ahead with their plans to hold competing conventions on March 2, one in western Michigan and the other in Detroit.
Both groups have proclaimed fierce loyalty to 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 former House member. .
“I said, ‘Can you get Hoekstra?’” Trump said of his endorsement for the job.
But Kristina Karamo, the Trump-style election denier who has led the Michigan Republican Party for nearly a year, is clinging to power. She claims that a Jan. 6 vote to remove her by a group of state party leaders was illegitimate, challenging the RNC’s recognition of Mr. Hoekstra on Wednesday as her rightfully chosen replacement.
The infighting has generated unwanted headlines and headaches for Republicans in Michigan, where Trump was averaging about 60 percentage points ahead of his last remaining rival in the nomination race, Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations. .
Trump’s relatively unimpeded march to the nomination has belied the avalanche of legal setbacks surrounding him, both in the four criminal cases and other civil cases against him.
Perhaps the largest so far came on Friday, with the fine for civil fraud, which could exceed $450 million with interest. He also undermined Trump’s relentlessly curated image of his business empire and his personal fortune, his calling card that helped propel him to reality TV stardom and then the presidency in 2016.
That ruling, along with a recent $83.3 million jury judgment in a defamation lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of a decades-old rape, could deplete all of America’s reserves. former president’s cash. (A jury previously found him responsible for sexually assaulting Ms. Carroll.)
