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International Business Times
International Business Times
Mary Papenfuss

Detroit Ad Punches Back Big Time At Trump's Vicious City Attack

The Kamala Harris campaign has released a new campaign ad crystalizing Detroit residents' fury after Donald Trump called their home a hellhole. (Credit: Screen shot/Kamala Harris Detroit ad)

A powerful new Kamala Harris Detroit ad is slugging back at Donald Trump after the former president viciously attacked the city while he was in Detroit in a baffling strategy to presumably win over voters there.

Times were tough, concedes the narrator in the ad paid for by the Harris campaign. But no one is going to put up with Trump comparing the city to "hell," he notes.

"We rebuilt ourselves, we look out for each other, we got our hands dirty and put in the work," notes the video. "This guy," it adds, showing Trump on a golf course, "he don't know anything about that."

It continues: "We are a city of winners, of up-and-comers, of builders ... here, we believe in freedom. We don't bow down to nobody, and we never will."

What "Donald Trump doesn't understand — or care to learn — when he says, the 'whole country will end up like Detroit if she's [Kamala Harris] your president,' he should be so goddamn lucky," declares the irritated narrator.

The ad grabbed hundreds of thousands of views and wide-spread support on YouTube and X.

After attacking Detroit on Thursday, Trump then bashed Aurora, Colorado, on Friday, also while speaking in the very town he was insulting. Some observers speculated that he may have forgotten where he was.

Trump branded the Denver suburb a "war zone," and claimed that buildings in the city had been taken over by gangs of illegal immigrants from Venezuela, which officials denied.

Colorado's Democratic Governor Jared Polis said that Aurora in fact is "safer than it has ever been," with crime down 31 percent over the last two years. The Aurora Trump is "talking about is one that the people of Colorado have never heard of," he told Kaitlan Collins on CNN's "The Source" on Friday. He welcomed the "eyes of the nation" on Aurora, which he called a "gem of a town" in a press conference.

Polis referred to a "matter of character" concerning Trump, who he said "doesn't seem to care who he hurts with his words or his rhetoric or the consequences of what he says."

He attributed what Collin's called Trump's "Rocky Mountain lies" to possible "cognitive decline," or simply not caring about reality. "He came, visited a hotel and left," said Polis. He quipped that Trump may now be so confused that he "doesn't even know show he's running against."

Aurora's Republican Mayor Mike Coffman appealed to Trump to accompany him on a tour of the city "so I can show you that the narrative that is being presented nationally about this city isn't true, that there are no apartment complexes under gang control, that the city's not under gang control."

Mass shooters, not illegal immigrants, have put Aurora on the crime map.

Aurora may more appropriately be a place to attack easy access to guns in America, which Trump supports. Twelve people were killed and 70 wounded in 2012 when 24-year-old James Egan Holmes opened fire with multiple weapons in an Aurora movie theater during a screening of "The Dark Knight."

It was deadliest shooting by a lone gunman in the history of Colorado and the state's second-deadliest mass shooting, after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.

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