Donald Trump has promised to make Michigan the “car capital of the world again” as he told a rally in the bellwether county of Saginaw that he will bring back thousands of jobs lost when General Motors moved more than a dozen factories to Mexico.
However, the former president made similar promises to Rust belt states before he was elected in 2016, with little result.
Trump, speaking at Saginaw Valley State University campus with groups of students and union workers in Teamsters for Trump T-shirts behind him, directly addressed the huge loss of industrial jobs in Michigan, a key swing state, over the past three decades.
Related: Saginaw: the swing county in the swing state that could decide the election
“Americans have watched as our country has been stripped of our jobs. By the way, this state, more than any other, you lost 60% of your automobile business over the years,” he said.
“Under my plan, American workers will no longer be worried about losing their jobs to foreign nations. Instead, foreign nations will be worried about losing their jobs to America. We’re bringing them all back.”
Trump pledged to immediately stop “the hurt they’re inflicting upon us”.
“This horrific nightmare for American workers ends the day I take the oath of office. It ends,” he said to loud cheers.
Trump lashed out at policies to promote electric cars, a popular position among some of the remaining auto workers in Saginaw who work at a plants manufacturing parts that will be made obsolete by battery-run vehicles.
“When I’m president, no state in America will be permitted to ban gas-powered cars or trucks,” he said.
Trump also led a bizarre attack on cars running on hydrogen.
“You know what happens when there’s a problem? It’s bad. The car blows up and you’re not even recognisable,” he said.
The speech was Trump’s 11th in the key swing state of Michigan during this election. Kamala Harris is targeting Michigan, alongside the other Rust belt states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as her clearest path to victory.
The state remains up for grabs, with opinion polls giving Harris a slight edge. Saginaw county is widely regarded as a bellwether of which way the election is going in Michigan.
Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the county by just 1.1% of the vote in 2016. Four years later, he lost Saginaw to Joe Biden by 303 votes.
Trump dismissed recent polls that have shown Harris leading by small margins in most of the swing states saying she got a boost after she became the candidate in July, but that is now waning.
“We’re up in every state. They had a honeymoon period,” he said.
With very few undecided voters still up for grabs, the outcome is likely to be determined by turnout, and Trump urged his supporters to cast their ballots by post or by early voting, even though he has unjustifiably attacked both methods in the past as too open to fraud.
He described November’s vote as “the most important election in the history of our country”. He urged supporters to “turn out and vote in record numbers” in order to make his count “too big to rig” as he repeated long-discredited claims the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“If I thought I lost, I wouldn’t be doing this again. You know, I’d be right now at the beaches of Monte Carlo, baby, or someplace having a nice life. But if I had my choice of being here with you today or being on some magnificent beach with a wave hitting me in the face, I would take you, every single time,” he told an amused and bemused audience.
Trump repeatedly returned to his promise to create jobs. He claimed to have the support of most union members even though the leaderships of their unions have endorsed Harris or declined to back either candidate.
“My pro-worker policies are one of the major reasons why I’ve been overwhelmingly endorsed by the rank-and-file membership,” he claimed.
Trump also called for the death penalty for drug dealers, which was greeted with loud cheers in a part of the US badly hit by the opioid epidemic and more recent flood of fentanyl smuggled from China and Mexico.
The former president renewed his now familiar attacks on Harris over the Biden administration’s immigration policies, accusing the vice-president of supporting “open borders” and of “dumping” immigrants on small towns that are unable to cope.
He repeated the false claim that Venezuelan street gangs have overtaken Aurora, Colorado, although with an unusual twist.
“We have Venezuela and street gangs that went into the same business as me, but they take their real estate with guns. I had to go borrow money from banks,” he said.
