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By Chris Smith
There are political reasons for Donald Trump to go on a crusade in the Bronx. Some are even plausible. Polls have shown that his opponent in the general election, incumbent President Joe Biden, is struggling to rally voters of color, a critical component of Biden’s winning coalition in 2020. Appearing Thursday night in the district’s Crotona Park, a community with a majority of Puerto Rican, Dominican and Black populations, Trump allows Trump to highlight a weakness of Biden’s and present himself as an option, even if his genuine audience is elsewhere. Four years ago, Biden won this county with about 68% of the vote, and Trump has no genuine hope of winning the Bronx, let alone New York State, this time around.
Still, the fact that the rally is taking place near the densest gathering of journalists in the U. S. makes for a broad and reasonable media policy for Trump (yes, adding this story). The rally in the Bronx is the newest and largest in a series of local Trump tricks. My favorite so far was the former president’s motorcade that headed to a fire station in midtown Manhattan so Trump could simply wave to the cameras and come back with a couple of (cold) pizzas delivered through his staff an hour earlier. Trump also visited a Harlem bodega where, two years ago, a worker fatally stabbed a visitor who jumped onto the store’s counter and shoved him. Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, eventually withdrew the second-degree murder charges after concluding that the worker could have simply acted in self-defense.
In the Bronx, Trump will no doubt once again claim (wrongly) that life in the city is like “living in hell,” rhetoric that would possibly appeal to the white suburban electorate Trump seeks to attract. But it angers Ritchie Torres, the Democrat who represents New York’s 15th congressional district, which covers most of the South Bronx, and calls Trump an “enemy” of the district. “Gun violence in a position like the Bronx isn’t inevitable: it’s a political choice that has been imposed” His catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic has been deadly: more than 7,000 people have died in the Bronx. We in the Bronx have a duty to denounce Trump for the fraud he represents.
It has been more than 8 years since Trump held a crusade in the city; The last time he was in the state was in Buffalo in 2016. He became a legal resident of Florida in 2019, fleeing his hometown in search of “respect. ” The only reason Trump has been back in New York for most of the last month is because Bragg forced him to stand trial on 34 counts of falsifying business records. But because the alleged crimes, which Trump has denied, arose from his alleged sexual relationship with porn actress Stormy Daniels, the parade of witnesses was a desirable adventure through the h8 of the city’s tabloid media culture, and a reminiscence from the days in the ’80s and ’90s, when Trump enjoyed a benign celebrity that perhaps landed him on the cover of the New York Post because Marla Maples supposedly claimed it gave her “the best sex I’ve ever had. ” Maybe this is what Trump dreams about when he closes his eyes and finds himself asleep in the courtroom: “Ah, the smart old days, when other people talked about who I slept with!”
With the Cannes Film Festival premiere of The Apprentice, which portrays Trump’s public rise in the 1970s under the tutelage of sinister lawyer Roy Cohn, the trial seemed at times like a look back at Trump’s glory days in New York. Still, its striking importance and popularity in urban life seems to be history. Yes, the city has a portfolio of Trump fans, and he has an antihero for sure following him. But the vast majority of Democratic-dominated New York state vehemently despises Trump, and he’s on a rampage in his legal system, publisher E. Jean Carroll won an $88. 3 million defamation lawsuit and state Attorney General Letitia James won a $454 million fraud judgment. And next week, the jury in Trump’s secret trial could hand down the first felony conviction against a former president.
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But before that verdict arrives, Trump is headed to the upper echelons. Over the years, it has had little to do with the Bronx; More recently, his company sold the lease of the golf course located in a remote corner of the city and carrying his call to flagstones. However, the Bronx also played a central role in Trump’s life. As Maggie Haberman describes in her insightful biography Confidence Man, Trump was a regular guest in former New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner’s personal dressing room, and it was his thuggish colleague who encouraged Trump’s taste for “gleefully punitive” control and the off-the-cuff catchphrase that complemented his character on the TV series Apprentice: “You’re fired!”
Trump introduced the deceptive symbol created through this display at the White House. Today, he’s looking to regain some of the fame he spent so many years aggressively building in New York City. Their rally in the Bronx may officially be a crusade event. But it’s not about government policy or election calculation, fighting crime or trolling Biden. Like many things related to men, it’s a matter of ego. This is Trump looking for his hometown, which made him rich and famous and then flatly rejected him, still harbors some love for him among genuine people. Trump will go to the Bronx to get validation, not votes, before 12 New York juries have a chance to convict him.
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