TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — Donald Trump was nearly three hours late to a rally in Michigan on Friday, prompting thousands of supporters to leave as others huddled in cold weather to wait for the former president at an outdoor rally in the prairie state. fight.

The Republican presidential candidate was delayed for an interview with Joe Rogan, the nation’s most listened to podcasterwhich spanned three hours in Austin, Texas. Trump has been aggressively courting younger male voters, among whom Rogan is very popular. The interview was released on Friday evening.

Democrat Kamala Harris was also in Texas Friday for an appearance with superstar Beyoncé in Houston at an event highlighting the conservative state’s abortion ban, which was passed after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Three of the justices who voted to overturn Roe were appointed by Trump.

Minutes before Trump’s rally in Michigan was scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m. Eastern, his spokesman posted on the social media platform X that Trump was just leaving Texas, more than a two-hour flight away. Trump recorded a video from his plane urging his supporters to stay, noting it was Friday night and promising, “We’re going to have fun tonight.”

Trump eventually took the stage at the Traverse City airport, where temperatures dipped to about 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius), and offered an apology.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “We’ve been so close and I thought you wouldn’t mind too much because we’re trying to win.”

The participants who had not left huddled together, some covered in blankets, as they waited to land. The crowd roared and seemed unhinged as North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and former Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon tried to kill time on stage. Hats were thrown to the participants.

Some of those who stayed around took it in stride.

“Well, we’d rather it be on time,” said Karen Targanski of Bay City, Mich., more than a two-hour drive away. She added that it was, however, “worth the wait.”

With 11 days until the election, Trump and Harris both detoured from battleground states for brief forays into solidly Republican Texas. Neither thinks the state is competitive, but they’re using it as a backdrop to send a message about the issues they hope voters will consider when they vote. For Trump, this is border security. For Harris, it’s abortion rights.

Appearing in Austin on Friday, Trump tried to turn Harris’ event into a line of attack on one of his favorite topics, immigration.

Hours before Harris’ star-studded appearance with Beyoncé, Willie Nelson, Jessica Alba and others, Trump accused the vice president of hanging with “woke celebrities” but not the families of people who have been killed by migrants.

Trump’s trip to Texas, his second stop in a border state in two days, comes as the former president ramps up his already dark and doomsday rhetoric against illegal immigration.

“We’re like a dumpster for the rest of the world to throw away the people they don’t want,” Trump told supporters in Austin on Friday. Trump continued to push the baseless idea that foreign governments are actively sending criminals to the US

Harris said the remark was “just another example of how he’s really bringing our country down.”

“The president of the United States should be someone who raises the bar and talks about the best of who we are and who invests in the best of who we are, not someone like Donald Trump who constantly belittles and degrades who he is the american people. Harris told reporters in Houston.

Throughout the campaign, Trump routinely appeared with grieving relatives of people who were injured or killed by people living in the country illegally. On Friday, he turned the microphone over to the mother of a 12-year-old Texas girl, Jocelyn Nungaray, whose body was found in June. Prosecutors have charged two Venezuelan men in the U.S. illegally with capital murder.

“She was just a child and because of the Biden-Harris policies that we have here … she’s not here anymore,” Alexis Nungaray said.

During a rally in Arizona on Thursday, Trump criticized Harris for the Biden administration’s record on the border, which he said has “unleashed” an “army of migrant gangs” that are “waging a campaign of violence and terror against our citizens “.

Trump sees immigration as the issue that won him the White House in 2016. He accuses Harris of committing “a vicious betrayal of America” ​​and of “orchestrating the most egregious betrayal that any leader in American history has ever caused to our people,” even though crime has gone down.

While migrants have been charged with some of the high-profile crimes that Trump repeatedly highlights, research has shown that immigrants — including those who entered the country illegally — are charged with fewer violent crimes than American citizens.

He also spread false theories that Democrats are registering undocumented immigrants to vote.

His interview with Rogan, who records his podcast in Austin, created another opportunity for the Republican nominee to highlight the hypermasculine tone that has defined much of his 2024 White House bid.

Trump did masculinity a central theme of his campaign, appearing on podcasts aimed at young male voters and calling on surrogates who sometimes use crude language.

At a Trump rally on Wednesday, former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson called Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz a “weak man” and compared Trump’s return to the White House to a father coming home ready to punish misbehaving children.

“When daddy gets home, you know what he says?” Carlson asked. “You were a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting hit hard right now.”

Rogan and Trump have a complicated relationship. Rogan previously said he refused to host Trump on his podcast because he didn’t want to help him.

Earlier this year, Trump criticized Rogan after the podcaster said then-candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. was the only person running for president that made sense to him. Kennedy has since suspended his bid, endorsed Trump and joined him on the campaign trail.

“It will be interesting to see how loud Joe Rogan gets booed the next time he steps into the UFC ring?” Trump wrote on his social media site in August, referring to Rogan’s experience as a commentator for the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

The podcaster is known for his hour-long interviews on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which is ranked No. 1 in the United States, according to Spotify’s charts. He calls women “chicks” and once laughed, as a comedian friend described, repeatedly forcing young comics to have sex.

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Associated Press writer Jonathan J. Cooper contributed to this report.