Wisconsin was among the states where Trump and his allies focused their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Democrats jumped at the opportunity to bash Trump for his alleged remarks about Milwaukee, which will not only host the Republican National Convention next month but is also the largest city in Wisconsin, a critical battleground state in Trump’s likely November rematch against President Biden.
“I happen to love Milwaukee,” Biden said in a social media post Thursday, sharing a photo of him posing with the Milwaukee Bucks at the White House in 2021.
Biden’s reelection campaign later announced that it is selling a T-shirt that reads, “(NOT) a Horrible City,” on top of a graphic of Wisconsin with Milwaukee identified.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) weighed in as he prepared to leave an unrelated news conference Thursday afternoon.
“And by the way, one thing I left out — I love Milwaukee,” Schumer told reporters. “It is a great city.”
And Milwaukee’s Democratic mayor, Cavalier Johnson, also got in a jab at Trump.
“If Donald Trump wants to talk about things that he thinks are horrible, all of us lived through his presidency, so right back at you, buddy,” Johnson said at a news conference.
On Friday, the brouhaha had not died down.
Biden’s campaign promoted Friday’s front page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where Trump’s alleged quote was featured as the top headline.
The Democratic National Committee also said Friday that it is putting up 10 billboards across Milwaukee highlighting Trump’s alleged criticism of the city, which will remain up through the Republican convention. According to the DNC, the billboards will also be up by the time Trump plans a campaign visit in Racine, Wis., next week, about 30 miles south of Milwaukee.
Still, many Republicans came to Trump’s defense, with some saying that he had not mentioned Milwaukee and others disputing that he was directly insulting the city.
“I was in the room. President Trump did not say this. There is no better place than Wisconsin in July,” Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) wrote on X.
Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) accused Democrats of “trying to twist President Trump’s words” and claimed he had been responding to her question Thursday about “the lack of ELECTION INTEGRITY by election officials” in certain U.S. cities, including Milwaukee.
“President Trump made no derogatory remarks about the great citizens and communities in those cities,” Tenney wrote on X.
Meanwhile, a representative for the Republican National Convention told a CBS affiliate station in Milwaukee that Trump had been referring to an ongoing dispute over whether protesters will be allowed at a park near the convention.
Trump has long bashed Democratic-led cities as bastions of crime and chaos. He referred to a Baltimore congressional district as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” in 2019. And more recently, he called New York a “city in decline” while holding a rally last month in the Bronx.
It’s not the first time this campaign season that Milwaukee has been slighted. Earlier this month, the RNC had to quickly swap out a photo that appeared atop one of its website pages after a reporter identified the original image as one of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, not Milwaukee.
The Republican National Convention is set to take place July 15-18 in Milwaukee. The Democratic National Convention will take place in August in Chicago.
