DETROIT — For a second time this week, Republican nominee Donald Trump spent long stretches of a public appearance without speaking — this time not because he chose a long musical interlude, but because of a faulty microphone.
Ten minutes into his speech here, Trump told the crowd: “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary, it’s not love, it’s not respect —”
He was warming up to say “tariffs,” but no one got to hear it. His microphone cut out.
A Trump rally is a tightly controlled spectacle — the lights, the music, the setting all choreographed to aggrandize him. Thousands hang on his every word. His speeches have been interrupted by chants, hecklers and even gunfire, but production glitches are rare.
On Friday, the stagecraft deflated. For 20 minutes, Trump paced the stage, voiceless, helpless, frustrated, alone. For a moment, he was no longer the entertainer.
His fans tried to give him comfort.
“Fight, fight, fight,” they chanted.
“Too big to rig!”
“Can’t stop Trump! Can’t stop Trump.”
“Thank you, Trump!”
He took in the adoring crowd, holding red and blue signs with the words “Build it in America” and “Make Detroit Great Again.” Someone handed a second microphone. He tried to speak into it, but no sound came through. He threw up his hands.
He tried talking into the lectern microphone again, but with no luck. He stood with his arms in front of him. He then shook his hand and put his arms out.
A sign flashed on the screens: “Technical Difficulties Complicated Business.”
As “Eye of the Tiger” began to play, Trump walked back to the lectern. He leaned into the microphone. “Hello,” he said, his voice now booming through the crowd. The audience cheered.
“I won’t pay the bill for this stupid company that rented us this crap,” Trump said. “I won’t pay the bill. And then we’ll have a story that Trump didn’t pay the bill to a contractor. No. When they do that kind of a job, don’t pay the bill.”
Trump continued his stump speech, but the microphone was not far from his mind.
As he reprised his apocalyptic language about the state of the country, he vowed that “November 5th, 2024, will be Liberation Day in America.”
He then added: “And when I get rid of this microphone at the end of this speech, it’s going to be Liberation Day for Donald J. Trump because I’m blowing out my voice to get this sucker done.”
Minutes later, he thanked U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers but said he didn’t want him to come onstage and use the “crappy microphone.”
“I want to keep him good and healthy,” the former president said. “I want him to have his voice tomorrow. When I get up tomorrow and I can’t speak, I’m going to say, ‘Detroit did it to me.’”
Trump returned to Detroit after Democrats seized on his remarks made here last week, when he compared the city to a “developing nation.” Friday’s rally was notably smaller than most of his events, with few standing beyond the rows of chairs in a downtown convention hall. Trump did not revise his dim view of the city but promised a brighter future under his leadership.
“You owe me big,” he said, after recounting that a friend and supporter claimed that plans to build car plants in Mexico were on hold because of Trump’s threatened tariffs. “You owe me.”
Trump mocked the pronunciation of Vice President Kamala Harris’s name — “I don’t give a damn if I pronounce it right,” he said — and repeated false claims about her record, such as misrepresenting reduced sentences that California voters approved during her tenure as the state’s attorney general. He again misrepresented Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics on immigrants with criminal histories, many of them serving sentences and in the country for many years, by claiming they had all been released by Harris.
He repeated a pledge to launch a mass deportation operation using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law last used to displace and detain Japanese Americans during World War II. In an interview earlier on Friday, Trump equated Japanese incarceration to the imprisonment of his supporters who are serving sentences for convictions related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Also on Friday, Trump complained about his campaign schedule during a roundtable in Oakland County. “You think this is an easy life I have, right? I go from here, I say, ‘Am I finished?’ They say, ‘No, sir, you have one more speech.’ ‘Oh, good. Where is it?’”
In the Detroit speech, the former president encouraged his supporters to vote early by dramatizing how a supporter might encourage a friend named Jill to motivate her husband.
“Jill, get your fat husband off the couch,” he said. “Get that fat pig off that couch. … Slap him around. Get him up.”
