The Scene
THE BRONX, NY — Donald Trump made a historic visit to the Bronx, the first by a GOP presidential candidate in four decades, and hammered Biden on higher grocery prices, while promising to cut taxes and reduce energy prices in one of the most impoverished New York City neighborhoods.
“On day one we’re going to throw out Bidenomics and we’re going to replace it with MAGAnomics like your hats,” Trump said to a crowd of several thousand in Crotona Park.
But the most notable comments were likely on immigration, with Trump making inflammatory, unsubstantiated claims that migrants seeking asylum at the border were plotting harm against Americans.
“Almost everyone is a male and they look like fighting age. I think they’re building an army,” he said. “They want to get us from within.”
Trump won just under 16% of the vote in the Bronx in his last election. The rally comes as Republicans are growing increasingly confident in their ability to make inroads with Black and Hispanic voters this cycle, including by tacking right on immigration and law enforcement, two issues once seen as a political vulnerability for the GOP with nonwhite voters.
The View From Voters
Trump supporters from Far Rockaway, Rockland County, Long Island, and beyond descended on the South Bronx to witness Trump speak — the first Republican presidential candidate to visit the area since Ronald Reagan. Even the spackling of actual Bronx natives were thrilled he made the effort.
“This is history, and I get goosebumps because it’s like, wow,” Elizabeth Robles, 42, told Semafor. “He’s a New Yorker, so he already knows what it is to be from New York. And this is an honor having him here in the Bronx. Like it’s super dope.”
Christina Sholomon, 36, lives in Stanford, Connecticut but manages a gentleman’s club in Queens. She said Biden “didn’t do anything for us.”
“My boss, he’s a huge Trump supporter as well,” Sholomon added, “and I’m like ‘please let me leave early today,’ and he’s like, ‘all right, only because it’s for Trump.’”
The View From Rubén Díaz Sr.
Former New York City Council member Rubén Díaz, a longtime Bronx fixture, arrived at the rally wearing a cowboy hat with an entourage of a dozen people. He led the crowd in chants of “Donald Trump is welcome here.”
Díaz, who later apologized to Trump onstage “as a Hispanic” for Colombia-born Judge Juan Merchan overseeing his Manhattan trial, isn’t exactly a typical Democrat. But he made the case to Semafor that Trump had a real opportunity to tap into local unease with recently arrived migrants who have strained the city’s services.
“We are Hispanic but we don’t want these people to come in like this,” Díaz said. “Maybe they thought that we were Hispanic and we’re going to love that. They’re taking away the community’s resources, the senior citizen’ resources, our children’’s resources.”
The View From Democrats
There were multiple events counterprogramming the rally, most notably one organized by local Assemblywoman Amanda Septimo that included several local unions. Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who represents the South Bronx, held a press conference Thursday morning to push back against the visit.
“Donald Trump’s rally may be IN the South Bronx but it is not OF the South Bronx,” Torres posted on X later along with footage of Trump fans. “Bluntly put, the Trump transplants are much whiter than the locals of the South Bronx, which is almost entirely Latino and Black.”
The Biden campaign called Trump a “lifelong racist” and posted an ad recapping Trump’s attacks on the “Central Park Five,” a group of teens who were wrongly jailed for rape and later exonerated, and family legal battles over housing discrimination laws.
Kadia’s view
Trump obviously isn’t going to win New York, despite suggesting otherwise during the rally, but he could make headway with a community that’s been exhausted by crime and cost-of-living issues in recent cycles. Democrats aren’t as quick to dismiss his outreach as they might have been in prior years after suffering through a disastrous midterms in which Republicans flipped four Congressional seats in the state and landed a city council seat in the same borough Trump visited Thursday. And with Democrats increasingly worried about losing Black and Latino support nationally this cycle, what happens in New York might not stay in New York.
