Crotona Park in the Bronx was dyed red this Thursday, the color of the Republicans and the MAGA movement (Make America Great Again), which brings together former President Donald Trump. The re-election candidate, who is being tried in the city in the first of four criminal trials, has taken a crowd bath at a rally held in supposedly hostile territory: the Bronx is one of the most Democratic counties in the United States. Or at least it was. Also the poorest in the city, in addition to half Blood: 65% of its 1.3 million neighbors are Hispanic and 31% are African-American. Both groups were the declared objective of the rally, because both Trump and his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, aspire to win votes from the black population that could be decisive in November. The influx of Hispanics from the Bronx has not disappointed the expectations of the campaign and the Spanish have been for a few hours lingua franca in that corner of upstate New York.
The Republican George Santos, expelled from Congress for lying, distributed smiles, greetings and selfies dressed in brown while a man equally orange and with the same toupee as the former president, acted as a socia in front of the police. Big men in camouflage suits and profuse tattoos, Proud Boys style, were making an apparent commotion—nothing serious, just a defiant display of themselves—despite the impressive police deployment, visible a kilometer from the place. Israeli flags, some men with kippahs and a multitude of baseball caps with the initials MAGA nodded in the very long line to enter the venue, fenced like a fort.
From the lectern, Trump acknowledged that he was not sure of the reception he would receive in deep New York. “I woke up and asked myself: Will it be hostile or will it be friendly? “It has been a festival of love!” He replied, satisfied. At eight in the afternoon, his usual mantra, “Make America Great Again,” put an end to his speech, in which he made many local promises, more typical of a mayoral candidate: improve security in the subway, evacuate the homeless encampments and getting the mentally ill off the streets and parks. A weaker program than the one usually used in the swing states, which can decide the electoral result in November. But when he promised to carry out the largest deportation of immigrants in US history, there was a thunderous applause: he had hit the nail on the head. “Raise the wall!” At the border, he was cheered on by the crowd, made up mostly of people of immigrant origin.
Celia, who arrived in New York in 1984 from the Dominican Republic, wore a recently purchased red cap, with the tag still hanging, “a memory, because it is not every day that a president comes to the neighborhood, the last one who rallied here was [Ronald] Reagan.” Conservative and Republican, she explained in line that she will vote for Trump in the hope that he will “put order, end immigration and stop giving money to Ukraine. If there is no money even for us, why are we going to pay for all this aid with our taxes? “The United States is not the world’s policeman, nor is it a charity.” When asked about immigration, she was blunt: “If they want to come, they should do it legally, like the rest of us did, with papers. This is how my family arrived. Now they have the border open.”
Along with crime and inflation, immigration was the argument most repeated by the dozen Latinos asked for this report; all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, of foreign origin but fed up, they claimed, with “an avalanche of foreigners, and that we have to support them with our taxes. Look at the streets of Manhattan, where several hotels have been converted into hostels: they are embarrassing. All those Venezuelans… why do they have to come here? If we don’t even have the money to pay bills because everything is so expensive, does it seem logical to you that we should assume its maintenance?” asked July, from Puerto Rico and a resident of the Bronx, who refused to say who she previously voted for. For none of the Hispanics consulted, Trump’s demonization of immigration (those bad men from his 2016 campaign; the “terrorists’ who bring diseases to the United States” in this one), meant the slightest but.
Counterdemonstration
The Republican’s legal troubles did not worry his supporters either. “It is a depraved justice, it does nothing but expose dirty laundry. That [el juicio por el pago de un soborno a una actriz porno para comprar su silencio] It is something that should only concern his wife,” Celia pointed out. “Oh, my daughter, yes, Trump has done very ugly things with women, but on a day-to-day basis I am only concerned about safety on the street and the future of my 11-year-old son. And crime is very ugly; we all have a curfew [toque de queda] in the mind: better not be on the streets at ten at night, don’t even think about riding the subway,” said Evelyn Mendez, a Brooklyn native who has lived in the Bronx for years. She is a caregiver for the elderly and children, she is a security guard among other precarious jobs, she claimed to “prefer order,” and that is why she will vote for Trump. Nearby, Margarita Rosario, a former Democratic voter, waved a flag magician“so that [la congresista demócrata por Nueva York Alexandria] “Ocasio cannot say that Trump is not welcome in the Bronx, we are waiting for him here, delighted that he comes.” Several Democratic representatives from the district had called for a counter-demonstration against Trump’s visit, pointing it out as persona non grata. The police deployment aborted some attempts at altercations between both sides.
Rosario, founder of a group of mothers against police brutality – she lost her son Antony at the hands of an agent – changed her vote in 2016, due to “the corruption of the Democratic Party, always the same ones sucking power.” Biden’s defense of abortion finally convinced her of the twist, “and what she says that a boy can be a girl if she wants, but what is that? When has this aberration been seen? ”She asked, summarizing two of the main Republican cultural wars against the Democrats.
Much of the Trumpian paraphernalia, and marketing, was inherited from 2020, who knows if due to a lack of campaign funds or for the sake of recycling; You could even see some T-shirts, faded by washing, with the slogan “Hillary [Clinton] to jail 2016″, about who was the Republican’s rival in 2016, in the elections that he won against the odds. In a caravan wallpapered with posters and pamphlets from the 2020 campaign, Pepe, an Asturian who came to New York “on an adventure in 1960,” happily posed for photographers. “Well, of course I am a Trump voter, I have always voted Republican, but Trump also has what it takes, arrests to put an end to all this shamelessness: children who do not respect their elders, delinquents, criminals, immigrants…” Everything, all in the same bag.
The latest polls—and recent local election results—smile timidly at Trump in hitherto adverse segments of the electorate. Although in theory the Bronx, and by extension New York, is lost territory – in 2020 the Republican lost to Biden by 23 percentage points – a rally as crowded as this Thursday’s, covered live by the main television networks, It has served as a sounding board to project its message among black and Hispanic voters in the rest of the country. In the case of African-American voters, the pulse of the two candidates is also notable: Biden visited Morehouse University on Sunday, one of the main black campuses in the country.
Trump won the presidency in 2016 with less support from black and Hispanic voters than any other president in four decades, although he then regained some ground among both groups in 2020. He has done so even more in this race, according to a March Siena poll. College for The New York Times, in which Trump appeared as the choice of 23% of blacks and 46% of Hispanics over Biden. In 2020, that support was 12% of black voters and 32% of Hispanics.
Although immigration appears in the foreground in their complaints and demands, with 35% of Bronx residents below the poverty line, high inflation is also taking its toll on Biden: many of the residents depend on food aid and many others, the habitual consumers of Happy Meals, hamburgers and other fast and cheap food options, have seen the cost of their usual diet increase by 31% since the pandemic. Much more than other products in the basic basket. As Ernesto explained in a nearby grocery store, next to a poster with the call for Trump’s rally, “people want to fill their stomachs, it’s not that difficult to understand, and Biden’s inflation doesn’t let them… if they saw the number of trusts that I have, I don’t have enough fingers to count them.” Immigration, insecurity and the economy, in any order: a cocktail that can be served to Trump by an unprecedented or unusual electorate. “Who says we’re not going to win New York?” he challenged the crowd this Thursday. The state has not voted for a Republican president since 1980, but the former president is more than willing to defy the curse.
