2024 Election
Keep Up With the 2024 Election
The presidential election is
14 days away. Here’s our guide to the run-up to Election Day.
Tracking the Polls. The state of the race, according to the latest polling data.
Swing State Ratings. The presidential race is likely to be decided by these states.
Key Issues. Here’s where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump stand.
Electoral College Paths. See how Harris or Trump could reach 270 electoral votes.
Early Vote Tracker. Here is what to watch as early voting gets underway.
Voting Deadlines. A guide to the key dates for voting in your state.
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Tom Pierce, a 67-year-old from Northville, Mich., did not truly believe that Mr. Trump would round up enough immigrants to carry out “the largest mass deportation operation in history.” Even though that is pretty much the central promise of his campaign. “He may say things, and then it gets people all upset,” said Mr. Pierce, “but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that.”
Did Mr. Pierce, a former chief financial officer, believe Mr. Trump would actually levy a 200 percent tariff against certain companies? “No,” he said. “That’s the other thing. You’ve got to sometimes scare these other countries.” (Indeed. In an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Mr. Trump said, “I’m using that just as a figure. I’ll say 100, 200, I’ll say 500, I don’t care.”)
Mr. Pierce added, “He’s not perfect. And I don’t necessarily care for his personality, but I do like how we had peace and prosperity.”
That dynamic is one that Mr. Trump has had with voters ever since he stormed onto the political scene nine years ago, and it endures, even as his language has
grown darker. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, 41 percent of likely voters agreed with the assessment that “people who are offended by Donald Trump take his words too seriously.”
“The normal rules just don’t apply to Donald Trump, and you’ve seen it time and again,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. Mr. Newhouse said that he has found in his polling and focus groups that “people think he says things for effect, that he’s blustering, because that’s part of what he does, his shtick. They don’t believe that it’s actually going to happen.”
But Mr. Trump and those around him have said a second term
would be different, since he finally has a firm grip on his party, and because many of the roadblocks that slowed him down before have been pulverized. This is a key part of Vice President Kamala Harris’s pitch to voters. “Understand what it would mean if Donald Trump were back in the White House with no guardrails, because certainly we know now the court won’t stop him,” she said during their debate. “We know JD Vance is not going to stop him.”
Still, even some of Mr. Trump’s more hardcore supporters, the people who go to the rallies, wonder how far he can or will go. Hal Garrigues, a retired pilot who attended a Trump rally in Bozeman, Mont., this year said in a phone interview that he didn’t believe Mr. Trump would “go after” Mr. Biden or his family, “because, I mean, before he said the same crap about Hillary, and then he didn’t do anything.”
Mr. Garrigues did not think that Mr. Trump would take the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (“It’ll never happen”), nor did he worry about Mr. Trump’s fantasy of “one violent day” of policing. “Nah, that’s just a sound bite,” he said. “He’s not going to do that.”
“I think people have very thick shock absorbers when it comes to Donald Trump,” said Kellyanne Conway, the Republican pollster who served as a senior counselor to the former president. “People have a very good sense of sussing out rhetoric from reality.”
And yet, as president, much of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric did become reality. What he said on Jan. 6, 2021 — “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” — ultimately led to his impeachment for inciting insurrection.
In a new book by Bob Woodward, General Mark A. Milley is quoted as saying the former president is “fascist to the core.” Mr. Milley is just one in a long line of top officials and military leaders who worked for Mr. Trump and then told tales afterward about having to constantly work to prevent him from acting out his most antidemocratic impulses.
In Detroit, Mr. Trump told a version of that reality that was not entirely different. He lamented how his first term in Washington had gone, admitted that he didn’t know much about the way the town worked, and that he had to rely on people he could not trust to carry out his wishes. “I now know the game a little better,” he said.
But he also seemed to be aware that there are many people who wonder about some of the words that come out of his mouth. Maybe some of those people were there in that very room. Maybe that’s why he went on a tangent about all the ways he thinks Democrats are screwing things up and then said, “You see, that’s the
real threat to democracy — stupid people.”
The businesspeople began to clap.
Shawn McCreesh is a Times reporter covering the 2024 presidential election.
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