Even for a man known for his bombast, Donald Trump’s foray into one of the poorest, most diverse and staunchly Democratic parts of America, New York city’s South Bronx, on Thursday night was an offensive move of breathtaking audacity.
He held his rally in the crucible of hip-hop, where 95% of the population is Black or Hispanic and where 35% live below the poverty line. Being Trump, he declared it an historic success.
“When I woke up this morning I wondered whether it will be hostile or will it be friendly. It was a lovefest!” he said towards the end of his 90-minute speech.
Just a few blocks away from Crotona Park – the location of Trump’s first campaign rally in New York state since 2016 – is the congressional district of his nemesis, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Trump notoriously told AOC to “go back” to the country where she came from – a bold line to take with a woman born in the Bronx.
Yet despite arriving in a New York borough that is home to some of his fiercest critics in the Democratic party, Trump strode onto the platform on a balmy evening as though he were returning to his own personal playground. “Right here in the Bronx, I’m thrilled to be back in the city I grew up in, the city I spent my life in,” he said.
What he pointedly didn’t say was that he wasn’t just turning up in New York after a long absence. He has of course spent the best part of the past six weeks holed up in a frigid courtroom just 10 miles south of Thursday’s rally site, his eyes often closed, while a jury considers whether to convict him of falsifying business records to cover up an alleged affair with Stormy Daniels.
In five days’ time he will be back in the Manhattan criminal courthouse for closing arguments, after which the jury will be sent out to decide his fate.
AOC goaded Trump remorselessly over his ongoing legal afflictions. In comments made before the rally, she said that the only reason the event was happening at all was because he was trapped in the city for the duration of the trial.
“The man practically has the legal version of an ankle bracelet round him,” she said.
By all accounts, the experience of enduring 20 court days of People v Donald J Trump has been excruciating for Trump. He has been forced into a world where he has no control, where people do not fawn over him, where he looks “haggard and rumpled”, as the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman memorably portrayed him.
On Thursday night that shriveled Trump was gone, to be replaced by a more familiar figure: Trump as the architect of the best economy on Earth; the most successful businessman and deal-maker ever … and the “hottest”, to boot (his description).
In epic meanderings that have become increasingly common at Trump rallies, he took several trips down memory lane, as though nostalgia has become his balm for legal agony. He listed at length his triumphs as a real estate developer in New York, so much so that at times it seemed the city’s legendary skyline was built by his own fair hands.
He swung between lavishly praising New York City, and denigrating it as a metropolis in decline. It was both the greatest city in the world that had spawned heroes like Teddy Roosevelt, Frank Sinatra and Babe Ruth; and a third world catastrophe littered with discarded needles, drugged-out homeless people, buckling sidewalks and lunatics pushing innocent bystanders onto the subway tracks.
The Trump campaign had billed the Bronx rally as an opportunity to display to the world how well the former president is doing with Hispanic and Black voters. A ripple of recent polls have indicated that his fortunes with these two heavily Democratic-leaning voting groups may be starting to improve.
“Who said we are not going to win New York? We are going to win New York City!” he prophesied, before going on to make a naked play for the majority-minority vote of the South Bronx. He claimed to have lifted 6.6 million people out of poverty when he was in the White House, comparing that with the “disaster” of Biden’s economy in which African American earnings had slumped almost 6%.
“African Americans are getting slaughtered. Hispanic Americans are being slaughtered. The biggest negative impact of the millions and millions of illegals coming into this country is against our Black population and our Hispanic population who are losing their jobs, housing, losing everything.”
Trump’s prediction that he will win New York is fanciful, political observers have no doubt. The last time a Republican president won in the Bronx was Calvin Coolidge in 1924. Trump lost to Joe Biden here in 2020 by a thumping 84% to 16%.
Which is not to say that something is not happening. The crowd at Crotona Park was unquestionably more diverse than your typical, almost exclusively white, Trump rally.
Up to a quarter of the thousands of people who came to hear him (the New York City parks department said Trump’s campaign had a permit for up to 3,500 people) were Hispanic or Black. Some of the supporters wore their Make America Great Again politics proudly on their sleeves.
“I’m a Black dyed-in-the-wool Republican,” read one T-shirt. A group of three Hispanic women waiting for the secret service to screen them at the start of the evening chanted “Trumpito!” “Trumpito!” as they danced to the official theme song of Trump Latinos.
Theo Diakite, 29, an African American who lives close to the park, said he was drawn to the rally out of curiosity. He has never voted in his life, but this year is feeling tempted to back Trump.
He has noticed that other people in his neighborhood share that curiosity. “There are a lot of people who were firm against him in 2020, but are now not so sure.”
When Diakite told his dad, a lifelong Democrat, that he was going to the Trump rally he expected a tongue-lashing. To his surprise, his father replied: “Yeah man, I’ve been very disappointed about what’s been going on these past two years.”
Anson Paul, a Black personal fitness trainer from the South Bronx, said he supported Obama in 2012 but didn’t vote for him. Paul was wearing a red Maga hat backwards. That was a sign of the times, he said.
“In 2020 I wouldn’t have worn a Maga hat – it was too crazy, people could have assaulted me.” Now, he said, things were changing.
“We’re still in the minority, but people in the Bronx are waking up to Donald Trump.”
Tiana Diaz, 43, was born and raised in the South Bronx in a family of Puerto Rican descent. She said she was proud to sport a pink Make America Great Again hat, having voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020.
For Diaz, Trump’s legal troubles in the courtroom merely strengthened her adulation for him. It reminds her, she said, of why she turned to him in the first place – the sense that everybody in the “system” was out to get him.
“I have a BS radar, and I knew it was all bullshit,” she said. “That trial is just plain BS.”
Democratic organisers and union leaders staged their own counter-rally at a separate corner of Crotona Park. It was a small gathering of only about 200 people, according to reports, but it carried a punchy title: “Trump isn’t welcome in the Bronx”.
• This article was amended on 26 May 2024 to remove some incorrect details about one of the people quoted.
