‘I love Milwaukee’: Trump tries to make up with the ‘horrible’ city
Two outlets reported Tuesday that the former president had planned to stay at his hotel over the state line during the July convention.
TroibNews 
RACINE, Wisconsin — Donald Trump went to Wisconsin on Tuesday to rail against President Joe Biden’s new immigration measures and rally the MAGA base.
But first, he had to convince them he didn’t think the state’s largest city was “horrible,” after all — and to dispute reports he planned to stay in Chicago, not the host city of Milwaukee, during the Republican National Convention there next month.
“I love Milwaukee. I was the one who picked Milwaukee,” Trump said when he took the stage for a rally in Racine, about 25 miles from Milwaukee.
He said it wasn’t true that he“doesn’t like” the city, adding, “I said, you got to fix the crime. We all know that. You got to make sure the election’s honest.”
Trump’s remarks came days after he reportedly called Milwaukee “a horrible city” during a meeting with House Republicans on Capitol Hill. And he had more to clean up when he arrived in Wisconsin. Earlier Tuesday, ABC7 Chicago, citing anonymous sources, said the former president originally planned to stay in Chicago and commute to Milwaukee for his speech at the convention.The New York Times also reported that Trump planned to stay 90 miles away at one of his own hotels in Chicago, citing three people briefed on his campaign’s logistics.
The Trump campaign denied the reporting. A person close to the campaign and granted anonymity to speak openly told POLITICO, “He was always planning on staying in Milwaukee.”
The flap served as a distraction from Trump’s response to Biden’s newly announced policy initiative to shield tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants living in the United States from deportation. Speaking to supporters here, Trump called the policies a “catastrophe.”
“He’s going to formally grant a mass amnesty to millions of illegal aliens that came into our country,” he told the crowd, which responded with boos. “Under this program, illegals will be given immediate green cards and put on the fast-track to rapid citizenship so they can vote. I think a lot of them are going to vote for me.”
He added, “Our country is under invasion. We should not be talking amnesty. We should be talking about stopping the invasion instead.”
Trump falsely claimed that “in the end we won” Wisconsin in 2020, reiterating an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in which he said he would accept the outcome of the election only “if everything’s honest.”
Wisconsin is a key battleground, and Republican National Convention organizers promised last year that all the state delegations would stay in hotels within the borders of the state.. They also suggested Republicans fly in and out of the Milwaukee airport, avoiding Illinois as a blue state that isn’t “politically in our corner,” Elise Dickens, CEO of the Republican National Convention, told POLITICO in December.
But Trump’s previous comments about Milwaukee didn’t deter his crowd of fans. Several of them didn’t believe he said anything disparaging — and some who did agreed with him.
Though the city saw a decline in overall crime numbers in the past year, Randy Humburg, a rallygoer from Racine, cited crime as a reason for Milwaukee becoming “a Democratic shit hole.”
