Harris campaign slams Trump for planning rally in Michigan town with long ties to KKK

Kamala Harris’s campaign has slammed Donald Trump for planning a rally in a Michigan town with long ties to the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists.

Trump’s campaign announced his return to Michigan this upcoming Tuesday with an event in Howell, a city of roughly 10,000 residents with long, storied links to the racist mob – which openly held events north of the town throughout the 1970s and even sporadically into the present era.

Pro-KKK graffiti was reportedly found in the town as recently as 2021 – and white supremacists staged a rally there just last month.

On Saturday, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign savaged the Republican ticket’s choice of venue arguing that Trump is making an appeal to the white nationalists who marched against Jews and other minorities in Charlottesville in 2017 – a moment which led to Trump controversially praising demonstrators and counterprotesters at a press conference.

“The racists and white supremacists who marched in Trump’s name last month in Howell have all watched him praise Hitler, defend neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, and tell far-right extremists to ‘stand back and stand by.’ Trump’s actions have encouraged them, and Michiganders can expect more of the same when he comes to town next week,” the Michigan communications director for the Harris campaign, Alyssa Bradley,told The Washington Post.

Trump’s campaign fired back in a statement to the Post calling Harris’s spokesperson’s comments “absurd” and noting that Biden himself spoke in Howell, Michigan, as recently as 2021. At the time, Republicans in the state correctly noted that the incumbent president had visited the district in order to boost the campaign of Elissa Slotkin, a rising star in the Michigan Democratic party