Donald Trump boasted and turned to his baseless false claim that he won a “Man of the Year” award in Michigan after a voter in the state asked him how he plans to protect U.S. jobs at a town hall-style campaign event on Friday.
The GOP nominee, in an event moderated by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), remarked on himself after hearing from someone named Ashley who identified herself as an employee at a Chrysler auto plant in the battleground state.
“With many jobs being outsourced as we speak, what actions will you take to ensure that our jobs stay in America so we can continue to build the best cars in the world here in Michigan,” asked the voter at the event in Warren, Michigan.
“So pretty much as we’ve been saying and what I want to do is that I want to be able to — look, your business — years ago, in this area, I was honored as the man of the year,” said Trump as he revived a long-debunked claim.
“It was maybe 20 years ago, oh, and the fake news heard about it, they said it never happened, it never happened.”
There’s no evidence whatsoever of this happening, according to investigations by HuffPost and CNN.
Former Rep. Dave Trott (R-Mich.) previously revealed that the claim may stem from Trump serving as the keynote speaker at the Oakland County Republican Party’s 2013 Lincoln Day Dinner in the state.
Trump didn’t receive an award, Trott told MLive.com in 2019, but he was presented with a tie, an Abraham Lincoln statuette and a copy of the Gettysburg Address before giving a “rambling speech touching every topic under the sun.”
Trump, in his rambling response on Friday, added that he “didn’t know who it was” who presented him with the “honor.”
“The fakers back there, see the fake news. But they said. They said, ‘Oh,’ and they looked and it, you know, they said it never happened but I said, ‘I swear to you it happened.’ It did happen, I was man of the year,” said Trump before claiming that he touched on the car industry in his “speech.”
Critics clowned the former president for getting “community noted” on X.
“Trump’s lie about getting some sort of man of the year award 20 years ago got an insane amount of fact checks 🤣,” wrote user @WUTangKids who pointed to the nearly two dozen sources cited under a clip of Trump’s remarks.
You can check out that and more takes on Trump’s response below.
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