Maggie Haberman Warns Trump Trashing Detroit to Applauding ‘White Businessmen’ Will Offend Other Voters

New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman warned that former President Donald Trump’s remarks about Detroit during a speech at the Detroit Economic Club could impact his political campaign.

At the event on Thursday Trump claimed that if his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, wins the 2024 election, the whole country “will end up being like Detroit.”

Trump told the audience: “The whole country’s going to be like—you want to know the truth? It’ll be like Detroit. Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”

Confused by the remarks, CNN host Anderson Cooper asked Haberman for her take on “why would he trash the city he is speaking in” and asked whether it was part of a larger “calculation” or strategy.

“I think he was appealing to the people in that room who were a group of largely white businessmen, as I understand it. You could hear there was applause when he said the line,” Haberman replied.

She continued: “But to your point, this is going to appear in local news outside of that room, and insulting the city that you’re in, especially one with a large number of black voters, is not usually a prescription that gets made for candidates.”

Haberman added that his comments might eventually backfire: “We’ll see if it matters to him. He’s been saying things like this for a very long time about various communities that he goes into. It hasn’t always mattered but it can have a cumulative effect especially in races that are very tight.”

Reflecting on the strategic value of the comments disparaging Detroit, Haberman warned that Trump’s campaign team would be unhappy with the remarks but that Democrats would wield it to attack him in the coming weeks.

She concluded: “It’s certainly not something that I think his advisers would have liked that he said. I think calling it a developing nation was something that you will see again used by opponents.”

Watch above on CNN.