Ladies and Democrats, the Bronx Is Turning
“Who would think?” Donald Trump asked. “Who would think?”
A tree grows in Brooklyn, a Republican speaks in the Bronx — six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Donald Trump reminded fellow New Yorkers Thursday of his success as a builder in an address that promised to “make New York City great again.”
Amid a sea of red hats and over the din of “USA!” chants, the former president pointed to garbage and needles in the streets, train stops that look like they last received a cleaning in 1932, crime, illegal immigrants draining resources, failing schools, and fleeing businesses as New York City problems he promises to fix.
Stump speech in much of its content, surreal speech in its setting, it struck as smart and effective.
He praised New York City and emphasized that Democratic politicians trashed it. He highlighted his role in building the city, pointing to the Ferry’s Point golf club in the Bronx, the Wollman Rink in Central Park, and renovations at Grand Central Terminal, as a means of buttressing his credentials to rebuild it. He shared the stage with former state senator and city councilor Ruben Diaz, Sr., who called himself “this Democrat, this black Puerto Rican with a kinky-hair and a broken English” before endorsing Trump for president.
Trump gave denizens of New York reasons to vote for him. These included his pledge to work with Democrats.
“As soon as I get back into the Oval Office, I am going to pick up the phone and I’m going to call your mayor and your governor, and I’m going to say, ‘This is President Trump and I want to come back and help!’” he announced. “Look, you have a Democrat mayor and a Democrat governor, and we are going to work with them.”
This remains beyond the ability of their fellow Democrat in the White House, a man whose name came up surprisingly rarely, at least for a Trump speech, on Thursday.
“Biden can’t do it,” he told the crowd. “He doesn’t know he’s alive.”
The vintage Trump on immigration, crime, schools, and the corruption of his pursuers yielded to a recitation of the song “The Snake” to demonstrate the folly of allowing those let out of prisons and mental institutions into the country, calling American wars in the Middle East “so sick and so stupid,” and recounting his friendship with William Levitt as he rose and the older man fell.
With Hispanics amounting to nearly two-thirds of the South Bronx’s population and blacks constituting almost a third, the foray might seem a political stunt. Polling indicates that the former president makes major inroads, vis-à-vis previous runs, in these traditional Democratic constituencies.
In April, Pew found a 77-18 percent African American imbalance between Biden and Trump, which, decontextualized, sounds like great news for Biden until confronted with the 92-8 disparity between the two men in 2020. The New York Times/Siena College survey taken earlier this spring indicated Trump’s more than quintupling his support among blacks since the last presidential election (four percent to 23 percent). The most recent Fox News poll shows Biden ahead 57 percent to 21 percent among blacks and squeaking by 42 percent to 37 percent among Hispanics.
Thursday seemed less about winning the Bronx, or the blacks, than about peeling away support from Biden from the constituencies Democrats have counted on, and perhaps taken for granted, for decades. Biden cannot win by bleeding black and Hispanic support.
In other words, Democrats err in fearing the boogeyman of bearded, rural white guys wearing MAGA hats smashing windows at the Capitol. As the police informed the babysitter in that classic, creepy TV movie: “We’ve traced the call—it’s coming from inside the house.”
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