Detroit speech offers potential risks, rewards for Donald Trump
WASHINGTON – Republican nominee Donald Trump heads into today’s remarks to the Detroit Economic Club with a lot on the line: A sober, disciplined policy speech could help him finally move past a recent series of self-inflicted wounds that have rattled his chances of being president.
But a speech like those Trump sometimes gives on the campaign trail — hurling invective, railing against Muslims or Mexicans, long on insults and his personal belief in himself but short on policy specifics — before one of the most esteemed groups of business leaders in the country could help doom him.
“This is a very serious echo chamber on politics,” said Lansing consultant John Truscott. “They are people who talk to people and are well-respected. ... They want a serious discourse on the issues of the day. I hope for his sake, he’s working from a prompter or a script and not freelancing on this.”
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Trump heads into Detroit at what could be an inflection point for his campaign. Since the end of the Democratic convention, several of his comments — including those criticizing the family of a Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq, his initial refusal to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan and U.S. Sen. John McCain and his suggestion that the U.S. election system may be "rigged" against him — have underscored claims by Democrats and some Republicans that he is too unpredictable and unsteady to hold the job.
Even as Trump has tried to move on, calling on the media to give more coverage to the Obama administration’s repaying Iran $400 million as it negotiated the release of four hostages, including Amir Hekmati of Flint, he has stumbled, saying he saw a video of the financial exchange when none exists.
Meanwhile, as his missteps have mounted, his place in the polls has slipped significantly, dropping in several battleground states, including Michigan, where an EPIC-MRA poll reported Friday by the Free Press showed him trailing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by 11 percentage points.
Poll: Clinton opens up 11-point lead on Trump in Michigan
The sold-out luncheon hosted by the Detroit Economic Club — a group known for bringing in high-profile speakers, including scores of presidential candidates through the years — could help change that. Considered one of the top regional executive leadership forums in the U.S., its membership and governance includes a who’s who of business and political bigwigs from metro Detroit, with Roger Penske, William Clay Ford and Pete Karmanos among its executive committee members.
The club has an open invitation to presidential candidates to speak. Most who do so, speak during the primary season, however. In recent years, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have been among the speakers, as has Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, in 2010. John Kerry — the Democratic nominee in 2004 — was the last sitting nominee to address the club.
Trump has been working toward turning his campaign fortunes around — talking up plans to double Clinton’s proposals for investing in roads, bridges and other infrastructure by issuing debt. He's also named an economic advisory council of known businessmen, including Stephen Feinberg. Feinberg's private equity firm owned Chrysler before it was rescued by the federal government and sold off to Fiat in 2009.
Trump’s 11:30 a.m. speech to the Economic Club has the potential to fight back against his skeptics, showing that he can deliver a restrained set of remarks void of his usual invective. According to his campaign, he's expected to explain to the club members more precisely how he would improve an American economy which, despite adding 255,000 jobs in July, has grown from the 2008-09 recession too slowly for many.
His campaign has been promising a more detailed set of economic plans: An Economic Club speech is a near-perfect moment to unveil them, outlining his case against Clinton’s own proposals and why he believes President Barack Obama’s efforts to revive the economy have failed — especially with Clinton now planning a speech of her own in Michigan on Thursday talking about her economic plans.
“I think he has hit a rough patch the last several days. This is a perfect venue for him to bring his campaign more into focus on the important issues concerning working Americans,” said Andrew Richner, a Republican member of the University of Michigan Board of Regents and member of Clark Hill’s government and public affairs group who plans to attend the speech.
Disagreement on trade deals
Some of those in the audience may be unsympathetic to Trump’s long-held positions, however. As a candidate, he, like Clinton, has railed against trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, that some in the industrial Midwest see as being bad for jobs. But among many free market proponents like those at the club, such a position may be seen as antithetical to their bottom lines in a global marketplace.
Not that he’d be the first to take on some of those interests, though. In March 2007, then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama criticized Detroit’s automakers for not building more fuel-efficient cars "to deal with the tyranny of oil.” Obama argued against an industry that, to his mind, had fallen behind foreign competitors while giving big bonuses to executives and lobbying against high fuel-efficiency standards.
The club is a place where boos are rare: Obama received what the Free Press called at the time “polite applause.” Two years later, his new administration would be called on to prop up General Motors and Chrysler with some $80 billion, steering them through bankruptcy and, by many accounts, keeping the American auto industry afloat.
Richner said that Trump’s trade message is not necessarily an unwelcome one before the club because many believe there are legitimate concerns with trade deals. But Trump, he said, needs to use the opportunity to “flesh out his proposal and explain what his plan is.” Talk of tearing up existing trade deals or setting off trade wars with unilaterally-set tariffs — or building walls along the Mexican border — aren’t likely to be as well received.
“A focused message on his plans with respect to the economy, trade and national security — those are the issues people here in Michigan are specifically interested in hearing,” Richner said.
Not all supporters
Meanwhile, not all of the members or usual attendees of Economic Club gatherings plan to go: The Free Press talked to some who said they planned to stay away because they oppose Trump’s candidacy and don’t want to be seen as being supportive by attending the speech at the Cobo Center.
“As an Arab American and as a Muslim, I don’t think I want to go and be insulted,” said Fay Beydoun, executive director of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce in Dearborn and a Democrat who is supporting Clinton.
In fact, with southeast Michigan’s large Arab-American and Muslim communities — one of the largest in the U.S. — Trump would be expected to modulate some of his past remarks regarding Muslims, particularly with many members of that religion well represented throughout metro Detroit’s business community. In the past, Trump has called for banning Muslim immigration into the U.S., though he has since tempered such proclamations. And he has said that Muslim communities haven’t done enough to root out potential terrorists, a claim that has been widely rejected by Muslim Americans in southeast Michigan and elsewhere.
Michigan also is one of the leading states in terms of accepting refugees from Syria and Iraq displaced by civil war there. Trump has said he wants to all but stop accepting refugees entirely until officials can more adequately vet refugees to ensure that potential terrorists don’t slip through. The U.S. already has in place a process that thoroughly vets refugees, who sometimes spend years in camps before emigrating.
Sandy Baruah, president and CEO of the Detroit Regional Chamber and a former assistant U.S. Department of Commerce secretary and head of the Small Business Administration under President George W. Bush, said he would probably not attend — a personal choice, he said, because he has decided he cannot support Trump. It’s no easy matter for him either, he said.
“I think any presidential candidate needs to be taken seriously,” said Baruah, who also worked under President George H.W. Bush, the last Republican to win in Michigan, in 1988. “What I think he needs to do as a candidate is not what he’s doing as a candidate. ... What I’m looking for is not just policy. I’m looking for temperament, I’m looking for the ability.”
For the record, Baruah’s got a lot of concerns about Clinton, too, and her trustworthiness — reflecting where a lot of voters find themselves. He said he’s not sure who he will vote for, or if he will write someone in.
“It’s surreal for me,” he said. “I would say my circle of friends and colleagues are almost evenly split. A third who will vote for Hillary Clinton, a third undecided, and a third who will support Donald Trump.”
Contact Todd Spangler: 703-854-8947 or tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at @tsspangler.