Before Donald Trump arrived at his Thursday evening rally in New York City, he claims to have asked aides a question: How would he be received in a hometown that has rejected him in two presidential elections and where he is so unpopular that his name has been stripped from a condominium tower and a golf course?
“They don’t like you — they love you, sir!” came the response.
While New Yorkers’ broad dislike of Trump remains, the former president found an oasis of adoration on a warm, humid evening in Crotona Park in the south Bronx, a hardscrabble neighbourhood that lies only a few miles from Trump Tower and yet is a world away.
During his address, Trump played his usual numbers about high inflation and an infirm Joe Biden. Yet he also tuned it to the locals, regaling them with old war stories about building in a city where so many others failed and no one said he could do it. “We got it done!” was a regular refrain.
If elected, he promised to refurbish the subway “so that it no longer looks like it hasn’t been cleaned since 1932”, and to improve security and affordability.
Above all, a president who punished New Yorkers while in office by, for example, delaying mass transit funding, promised to bury the hatchet. And, he said, he would call the city’s Democratic mayor and the state’s Democratic governor and pledge: “This is President Trump and I want to help.”
Trump came to the south Bronx just days before a New York jury is expected to begin deliberations in his criminal trial related to payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.
He is not the first president to visit the neighbourhood, which was ravaged during the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s and still suffers from disproportionate levels of poverty, unemployment, violence and other ills. Jimmy Carter came in 1977 to promise urban renewal. Ronald Reagan turned up three years later, likening the neighbourhood to “London after the Blitz”.
For Trump, whose father, Fred, was born in the Bronx, the neighbourhood was a useful backdrop to further his outreach to Black and Latino voters, two elements of the Democratic coalition whose enthusiasm for Biden, the president, appears to be waning.
Recent polls suggest Trump is on track to more than double his support among Black voters in 2020 to about 20 per cent. While still paltry, that would be the best Republican performance since 1964.
Both groups, he said on Thursday evening, were being “slaughtered” by a wave of migration that has strained city finances. “[They’re] losing their jobs, losing their housing, losing everything they can lose,” Trump said.
Kevin Seecharan, 67, a Trinidadian immigrant who has lived in the Bronx for more than 30 years, credited Trump for venturing into hostile terrain. “When you want to meet the enemy, you have to meet the enemy on their territory,” he said.
Seecharan raised three boys in the neighbourhood, all of whom went on to university. He twice voted for Barack Obama. But, like others at Crotona Park on Thursday, he complained that the neighbourhood was deteriorating, and he seemed to have lost faith in Democratic politicians to reverse the situation. “The Bronx is getting horrible now,” he said.
Margarita Rosario, a retired city worker and one-time Democrat, agreed. “There’s no money for veterans, and now we’ve got all this money for immigrants,” she said.
Her family came to the Bronx from Puerto Rico in 1958, when she was four, and she had fond memories of spreading out a blanket at the same park with her mother and brothers. “But there was a lot of junkies, too,” she said. “It was a zombie city.”
In many ways, the rally resembled many other Trump events. A carnival atmosphere prevailed, with supporters in outlandish outfits mingling with self-styled pro-Trump “content producers” equipped with cameras.
Yet there were also distinctive New York flavours: salsa and reggaeton beats, Orthodox Jews wearing Maga hats, clouds of marijuana smoke and much Spanish. One T-shirt read: “Jose Biden No Bueno.” Just up the street, men were playing cards on the sidewalk while water gushed from a hydrant.
“Trump was a better president because other countries was mad scared of us,” Riley Suarez, 14, opined. He was one of throngs of neighbourhood kids who had come out of curiosity to join the spectacle. A friend called Biden “lazy”.
A small group of counter-protesters on a hill shouted “Fuck Donald Trump — and Joe Biden!”
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