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DETROIT >> Former President Donald Trump was roughly an hour and a half into a nearly two-hour speech to the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday afternoon before he got to his main new policy proposal: a call to make car loan interest fully tax deductible.

The proposal, which came late during a circuitous speech to business leaders, merged two of Trump’s favored efforts to win voters: targeted tax cuts aimed at key voting blocs nationwide and promises to revitalize the auto industry in Michigan, a critical battleground state. Even before this latest tax cut proposal, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that Trump’s agenda could add as much as $15 trillion to the nation’s debt over a decade.

Trump claimed his plan would “stimulate massive domestic auto production and make car ownership dramatically more affordable” for families.

But before he got to his new proposal, Trump often rambled, reviving his false claims about the 2020 election, mocking President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign crowds, praising Elon Musk’s rockets. At one point, as he criticized Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump did something that politicians rarely do: He took a pointed dig at the city that was hosting him.

“Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president,” he said. “You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, blasted Trump’s comments in a social media post, saying that “you better believe Detroiters won’t forget this in November.”

As Trump spoke about his proposals to revive the auto industry, he used some of the same kind of violent, cataclysmic language he often uses to vilify immigrants.

“After our victory in 2016, the Michigan auto industry was on its knees, begging for help, gasping,” he said at one point. Later, he claimed that international corporations had been allowed to “come in and raid and rape” the nation, a word choice he underscored. “That’s right, I used the word,” he said. “They raped our country.”

Trump’s proposals were the latest example of his dangling new, and expensive, tax benefits to groups of voters that he sees as key to his election chances next month. The former president has already called for eliminating taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security benefits. On Wednesday night, he released a statement calling for a tax cut for Americans who live abroad, who must still file a tax return with the Internal Revenue Service.

It is not clear how much it would cost the federal government in lost tax revenue if car loan interest were fully deductible.

Trump’s proposal to make interest on car loans tax deductible could be likened to the mortgage interest deduction, which Trump limited in the 2017 tax cuts that he enacted as president. Trump expanded the standard deduction, which has pushed far fewer Americans to itemize deductions on their tax returns. In 2017, before the law went into effect, 31% of Americans itemized their deductions on their tax returns, according to the Tax Policy Center. In 2020, just 10% of Americans itemized, the center found.

Higher-income Americans are much more likely to still itemize deductions on their tax bills — and therefore would be the main beneficiaries of Trump’s idea. (The mortgage interest deduction encourages people to buy homes, which tend to gain value over time; the merits of a federal tax policy that encourages people to borrow to buy automobiles, which lose value quickly, could be more questionable.)

During his speech, Trump also promised to keep “Chinese-produced autonomous vehicles” off American streets, an effort already being undertaken by the Biden administration, which last month proposed banning Chinese-developed software from internet-connected vehicles in the United States. Though few Chinese vehicles are on U.S. roads, federal officials called the move a proactive effort to address potential national security issues.

Trump also reiterated many of his manufacturing proposals, including his call for tariffs and his plan to offer companies tax breaks and other benefits if they move their manufacturing to the United States or keep it there.

The former president also signaled that he was prepared to take more aggressive protectionist measures to shield the automobile sector from foreign competition in a second term, saying he would take steps to prevent China and other countries from passing products through other countries to avoid U.S. tariffs.

And Trump said he would formally notify Mexico and Canada that he planned to renegotiate the trade deal that he reached with them in 2018. He warned them again that he would seek to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese cars that are manufactured in Mexico and imported to the United States.

It had been expected that parts of the trade deal would be revisited in 2026. Harris said two weeks ago that she would open the review process. She was one of 10 senators to vote against the agreement.

Trump’s remarks, held at the Sound Board Theater inside the MotorCity Casino and Hotel, were given to an audience atypical for a Trump event. Unlike a raucous rally, the business leaders in the room were more muted in their response.

And the Economic Club’s president, Steve Grigorian, noted that a number of Democratic officials were in attendance, including Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, who in 2020 faced armed protesters at her house chanting that they refused to accept that Trump had lost that election.

Trump acknowledged her attendance while complaining about Democrats’ stance on voter identification laws.

Before Trump’s speech, the Harris campaign held a call with Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, which endorsed Harris. Fain — whom Trump attacked repeatedly during Thursday’s speech — criticized the former president’s economic record, saying his time in office was marked by “plant closings, job loss and union busting.”

Voters in the Detroit metropolitan area will be crucial if Trump hopes to win Michigan, a battleground state that helped deliver his victory in 2016 but that he lost in 2020. His speech Thursday was his fourth event in the state in the past two weeks.

Polls have shown Trump and Harris locked in a tight contest in the state. Trump’s perceived strength on economic issues has cut into an advantage that Harris held in early August, shortly after she replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, according to a recent survey from The New York Times and Siena College.

After speaking for nearly two hours, Trump sat down with John Rakolta, one of his former ambassadors to the United Arab Emirates, to take questions. As some people left the room, Rakolta acknowledged the lengthy remarks.

“That was a tremendous amount of information that you’ve given to us,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company