Donald Trump’s speech to Detroit business leaders Thursday night contained a truly bewildering riff about “Biden circles” and their beauty.
The former president has made headlines over the course of his campaign with strange speeches about whether it’s better to be electrocuted or attacked by a shark and giving unintelligible, rambling answers to policy questions. Trump has defended his free-wheeling, sometimes unfollowable oratory style as a deliberate ploy he calls “the weave”—but his latest effort looked more like unraveling.
During Trump’s speech at the Detroit Economic Club—which included a segment insulting the city of Detroit, prompting condemnation from the mayor—the Republican nominee was speaking about how American manufacturing can be affected by other countries’ tariffs before veering off-topic into a discussion about Elon Musk, rockets, and, for some reason, circles.
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“It’s very sad to see and it’s so simple,” he said, continuing:
I mean, you know, this isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they wanted to land. Or he gets the engines back, that was the first I realized—I said: ‘Who the hell did that?’ I saw engines about three, four years ago. These things were coming—cylinders, no wings, no nothing—and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace with a circle. Boom. Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right? He’d have eight circles and he couldn’t fill ’em up. But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote. I don’t know, I don’t know—couldn’t fill up the eight circles. I always loved those circles, they were so beautiful. They were so beautiful to look at. In fact the person that did them—that was the best thing about his—the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t get people, so they used to have the press stand in those circles, because they couldn’t get the people. Then I heard we lost, ‘Oh, we lost.’ Now, we’re never gonna let that happen again. But we’ve been abused by other countries. We’ve been abused by our own politicians, really more than other countries. I can’t blame them. We’ve been abused by people that represent us in this country—some of them stupid, some of them naive, and some of ’em crooked, frankly.
Trump appears to be referring to circles on the ground used as a social-distancing measure at President Joe Biden’s campaign events four years ago during the COVID pandemic. Trump was seemingly reminded of them by SpaceX’s reusable rocket boosters because they land on circular targets painted on drone ships. What any of that has to do with tariffs is anyone’s guess.
Joe Biden speaking at a September 2020 campaign event where attendees were socially distanced using circles on the ground.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty
SpaceX boosters land on barges marked with circular targets.
SpaceX photos via Wikimedia CommonsThe circle ramble wasn’t his only bizarre aside during the speech.
“The word ‘grocery,’ it’s a sort of simple word,” Trump said at another point in his address. “It sort of means like everything you eat. The stomach is speaking, it always does.”
