Trump praises Xi and Putin at Michigan rally, attacks Biden

Exactly a week after the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for President of the USA appeared at the party's rally in Michigan.

Xi "wrote me a beautiful note the other day when he heard about what happened," said Trump to his supporters during the first rally after July 13, when he almost fell victim to an assassin.

"I got along very well with President Xi," added Trump, discussing economic policy towards China during his presidency.

Much of his speech was dedicated to criticizing Joe Biden's policies. It also became an opportunity to speak favourably about Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, whom the incumbent president considers dictators.

Trump called Xi "a brilliant man; he controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist" and added that Xi makes people like Biden look like "babies." Trump noted that his praises for regimes caused a stir and criticism in the media.

Nevertheless, he decided to add fuel to the fire by saying about Xi and Putin: "They're all smart, tough. They love their country."

This is not the first time Trump has spoken positively about Xi and Putin. At the end of January, he similarly assessed the Russian dictator and the Chinese leader.

At the rally, Trump did not spare the Democrats from some critical remarks either. "They have a couple of problems. No. 1, they have no idea who their candidate is," he said, eliciting applause from the audience. "This guy (current President Joe Biden) goes and he gets the votes and now they want to take it away," he added, referring—as Reuters believes—to the fact that Biden won the nomination process in his party so far.

"They keep saying he's a threat to democracy. I'm saying, What the hell did I do to democracy? Last week I took a bullet for democracy. What did I do against democracy?" said the Republican candidate.

"As you're seeing, the Democrat Party is not the party of democracy. They're really the enemies of democracy," he added.

During the rally in Michigan, one of the key "swing" states that largely determine the outcome of the November 5 election, Trump appeared for the first time with his vice-presidential candidate, Senator J. D. Vance.

In the 2016 election, Trump won Michigan by a margin of just a little over 10,000 votes, but the Democratic candidate Joe Biden reclaimed the state in 2020, winning by a margin of 154,000 votes.