Trump lauds Xi and Putin at Michigan rally, mocks Democrats

Exactly a week after the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Donald Trump's life, the Republican candidate for the US presidency appeared at a party 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 13 July, when he almost became a victim of an assassin.

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

A significant part of his speech was dedicated to criticising Joe Biden's policy. It also became an opportunity for laudatory remarks about Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, whom the incumbent president considers to be dictators.

Xi is "a brilliant man; he controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist," Trump said about the Chinese leader and added that Xi makes people like Biden look like "babies." Trump noted that his praises for the regimes provoke excitement and criticism in the media.

However, 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 a few mocking remarks. "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, according to Reuters, to the fact that Biden had 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 on which the outcome of the 5 November elections largely depends, Trump also appeared for the first time with his vice-presidential candidate, Senator J. D. Vance.

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