Why on Earth Would Trump Plan This Speech At This Location At This Time

This week, Donald Trump will hold a rally in Howell, Michigan, where he will give a “major speech” on the topic of “Crime and Safety.”

Because crime rates are actually down and have been trending thus for decades, the expectation is that Trump’s remarks will lean pretty heavily into pointing out the fact that he is white and his opponent Kamala Harris is not. This in and of itself isn’t that surprising, as his attacks on Harris to date have mostly centered around her not-white-sounding name, her people’s inability to control their sexual urges, how you can just tell she has a low IQ, an assumption that people of her sort are all interchangeable, or just throwing up his hands because really what’s the deal with people having mixed race kids.

What is surprising, however, is where Trump has decided to give this speech about criminals making our streets unsafe: the township of Howell, Michigan — which at first blush is a head-scratching place for a POTUS candidate to hold a major campaign rally.

Which is not to say that there are no reasons for a politician to come to Howell; there are.

For example, Biden gave a speech in Howell during the first year of his Presidency, despite knowing it would be hostile territory. His staff understood in advance that even in a small town, there would be a lot of visible local protesters (and there were). But at the time Biden was working to build bipartisan union, rural, and working class support for both his Infrastructure Bill and his Build Back Better Bill. The Howell stop was one of several on a tour of smaller or mid-sized rustbelt, midwest, and northeast towns, which also included cities and towns like Scranton, Kennet Square, Elk Grove Village, and Storrs.

Trump, on the other hand, has no obvious traditional strategic reason to hold a rally centering on ‘Crime and Safety’ in Howell.

Howell is, by almost any measure, a pretty normal American town. It has no history of systemic crime issues, and because of this, there is no previously-passed-policy ‘success-story’ of successfully combatting high crime rates to offer as a blueprint. It’s not centrally located, and because of this it risks amplifying his recent problem of suddenly not being able to fill smaller venues than he filled in 2020. Howell is not a town he used his executive power to assist when he was president, so the only federally-funded infrastructural improvements over the past decade he can point to happened under, well, let’s say someone else’s watch. And there are no political bridges to be built; people in Howell are going to overwhelmingly vote for him whether or not he visits them.

There is, however, a less-obvious, less-traditional strategic reason for choosing Howell. Because there is one thing that Howell is known for even more that it is known for melons: Howell, Michigan is a symbolically important city with the nation’s far-right white supremacist organizations.

And to be clear, when I use the phrase “white supremacist” here, I’m not using it in a Robin-DiAngelo-esque, “in American everyone is a white supremacist” kind of way. I’m not even using it in a Richard-Spencer-esque, V-Darey, “the science of race realism” kind of way. I’m using it in the straight up, hardcore, literal Neo-Nazis and Aryan Brotherhood type of white supremacist kind of way.

Howell, Michigan, you see, has a national reputation — fair or not — of being deeply connected to the Ku Klux Klan.

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Nestled almost perfectly between the state capital Lansing and Detroit, Howell’s current population bristles at the suggestion that it is somehow a hotbed of Klan activity. And they have a point.

The region surrounding Howell has historically been a hotbed of Klan activity. Most of that activity, however, took place in the nearby rural township of Cohoctah; those activities were mostly limited to Klan meetings, rallies, and cross-burning ceremonies. Over time, however, perhaps due to a combination of its larger size and proximity, Howell replaced Cohoctah in white supremacist lore as the hub of midwestern white nationalism, and this would on occasion lead to various Klan or Aryan groups traveling to Howell. Often, these visits resulted in transgressions, such as the burning of a cross on the lawn of a black family, and a small but national-news-worthy Klan Rally in 1994. All or most of the agitation inside Howell, however, has historically come from people outside of the town. And all of the above activity, be it in Cohoctah or Howell, was directly linked to one man: Robert “Pastor Bob” Miles.

Originally from New York City, Miles is perhaps the most venerated (by white supremacists) of the Northwest Territorial Imperative (NTI) movement. A loose affiliation of far-right Christian white nationalists, the NTI encouraged white nationalists to move their families from across the country and relocate them to rural areas in Oregon, Washington, Western Montana, and — especially — Idaho. The idea was to grow a Christian “white homeland” inside the US that would eventually branch off and form its own nation, repatriating any remaining Jews, blacks, Catholics, and other minorities to the US and Canada.

The NTI movement was and is small, but has somehow always been surprisingly far-reaching in modern US history, politics, and culture (especially online culture).

For example, if you’re of a certain age and you remember the nationally-covered court cases against skinhead cults in the 90s, those cults were part of the NTI movement. Every cliche you may have heard about Idaho being full of Nazi and Aryan camps comes directly from public perception of the NTI at that time, as do those apocryphal stories about whole communities of white supremacists turning out to all be embedded reporters and federal agents. The shorthand of both “88” and “14 words” come from leading proponents of the NTI. Ruby Ridge’s Randy Weaver fatefully moved his family to Idaho to be part of the NTI. The Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Constitutional Sheriffs movements all flow directly downstream of the NTI, as do both Bundy standoffs.

Over the past forty years, the NTI’s influence on right-wing populism, west-coast libertarianism, conservative talk radio and online rightwing spheres has been growing. And the most influential voice within the NTI was Pastor Bob Miles.

Miles was a Klan Grand Dragon in the 1960s, but like other Klansmen of that era he let the lines separating the KKK and other violent white supremacist organizations dissolve and bleed together; by the 1970s he had relinquished the title to try his hand at forming his own violent Aryan organizations. And make no mistake, Miles was violent. When school segregation came to Michigan, he and his followers were convicted of bombing ten school buses in Pontiac. He was also convicted of kidnapping and torturing a deputy school superintendent in Ann Arbor. (Miles had originally planned to kill the deputy superintendent, but decided at the last minute that having him live to tell the tale would gather more publicity.)

Today, Miles is something of a patron saint to people inside extreme supremacist organizations, and Howell’s role in his life has made the township something special as well. That small Klan rally in ’94 described above was in his honor, two years after his death. Just last month, a small group of Neo-Nazis made the news when they traveled to Howell to chant “We Love Hitler” to commemorate the sacred 25th anniversary of Miles’s death.

Although that group did get their dates of commemoration slightly wrong. Because Pastor Bob Miles didn’t actually die 25 years ago last month.

Pastor Bob Miles died 25 years ago this week.

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One of the difficulties in dealing with the very worst actions of Donald Trump is that much of it is so crazy that it’s easier to pretend everything’s all a big coincidence and move on.
And because of this I suspect that, faced with the question “why on Earth would Trump plan this speech at this location at this time,” most will do exactly that. But before you move on, consider: since Trump announced his Howell stop, he has added four additional campaign rallies.

One of these rallies will be in Phoenix, which is certainly a fairly normal place to have such an event. The others, however, are in locations less well known nationally. One is in York, Pennsylvania, a mid-sized city that was a hub of Klan activity throughout the last century, and which has seen a resurgence over the past decade. Another is Glendale, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix in Maricopa County which is the global headquarters of the Klan and several other white nationalist organizations. The last is Asheboro, North Carolina, relatively in the middle of nowhere outside of Greensboro, where racial tensions flared during Trump’s first term, including Klan rallies and cross burnings. (Full disclosure: in 2017 I was sent to the last by Marie Claire Australia to cover one such Klan rally, which doubled as a Trump electoral victory celebration.)

That’s a lot of coincidences.

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If you were to look for some kind of precedent for Trump choosing Howell to give a speech on “Crime,” the most immediate comparison point might be Ronald Reagan’s famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) speech in August of 1980 on “States’ Rights” in Neshoba County, near the site where three civil rights workers were buried in shallow graves after having been tortured and kill by Klansmen a quarter century earlier. That was a speech which, according to Reagan, was meant to appeal to southern “Georgia Wallace-inclined voters.”

Today, Reagan fans will tell you all of that was a wacky coincidence of which the Gipper could not possibly have been aware, while others will say, of course he knew, how could he not. Regardless, the degree to which Trump’s rally this week mirrors Reagan’s is uncanny. However, in some ways the comparison is not perfect.

When Reagan made his Neshoba speech, he was a son-of-liberal-Hollywood, union-president, Californian west-coaster fighting to be seen by a bunch of right-leaning Southerners as exactly none of those things. He was trying to convince a certain group of people he was something they didn’t necessarily believe that he was, and that they should reject the only actual Southerner in the race. That is decidedly not what Trump is attempting in Howell. The Venn diagram of “People For Whom The Symbolism Of Howell Pulls Heartstrings” and “People Who Are Planning To Vote For Kamala Harris” are two distinct, not-touching circles in different rooms of different houses on different, distant planets. It does’t come with the potential electoral advantage Reagan’s speech had. So, as I said, Reagan does’t work that well as a comparison.

However, we need not look to Reagan, because there is another past president whose experience is more comparable, and to whom we might look to understand Trump’s decisions here — a past president whose actions more closely match the actions of the current GOP nominee this week.

Like the current GOP nominee, this other president was also looking down the barrel at an election he was worried he might lose. Like the current GOP nominee, this president had also begun to prepare for his possible loss by insisting that if he did lose, it was only because the other side cheated, and thus he should be declared the winner regardless. Like the current GOP nominee, this president also cozied up with extremist far-right, violent organizations — groups like the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers —and signaled quite publicly that they might be needed to answer a call to violence to protect his claims. Like the current GOP nominee, this president was surprisingly transparent throughout everything, explaining to people at his rallies what his intentions were — knowing that the mainstream political press would find it so untoward to take him at his word that they’d largely ignore it.

That is the past president Trump is clearly modeling himself after this week: himself.

And we will all be fools to pretend we don’t see it happening.