Friday, May 24, 2024, 1:28 p.m.
It is necessary to go back to Ronald Reagan’s last victory in 1984 to find a moment in time in which a Republican presidential candidate has won in the State of New York, the Democratic stronghold in which this Thursday Donald Trump launched a blow to Joe Biden.
“Who said we’re not going to win New York?” he asked rhetorically to the motley mass that emerged last night in Crotona Park in the Bronx. “I am here tonight to declare that we are going to turn New York City around very quickly.”
The South Bronx had become a fair. Some had come out of simple curiosity. “I only live a block from here, how could I not go and see it?” Justified Patricia, a Costa Rican who says she is still deciding her vote. Her partner, Eduardo, was very clear about it. «I’m going to vote for Trump. “Biden has been a catastrophe for this country.”
Under the tycoon’s triumphant wake, the disinherited of the post-pandemic and globalization gathered in thousands in the heart of the largest park in the South Bronx. It was Trump’s first rally in New York since his first campaign in 2016. Republicans had requested permission for 3,500 people, but according to Fox network accounts, more than 25,000 gathered.
![Two attendees at the rally in Crotona park.](https://s2.ppllstatics.com/rc/www/multimedia/2024/05/24/Clipboard.jpg)
Two attendees at the rally in Crotona park.
EFE
Workers from an adjacent construction ran to photograph him, motivated by a false rumor that he was among the audience and the excitement of feeling so close to a star they never expected to see on the streets of the Bronx. The tycoon did not even reach 10% of the vote in this New York district in 2016, but since then his popularity has skyrocketed, in part, incomprehensibly, due to scandals such as the 2020 presidential transition, which ended with the assault on the Capitol on September 6. January 2021, his frequent outbursts or the current trial over payments to actress Stormy Daniels.
Miguel, a Mexican worker who had dropped his helmet to run after Trump, has no doubt that the country was better off with him. “There is a lot of difference, today everything is very expensive.” It is a tangible perception that any voter can measure when paying at the supermarket or stretching their payroll. So loud and clear that there is nothing Biden or the White House can say to convince them that the economy is doing well. In these belt-tightening, the offenses that some may have felt when the Republican leader said that Hispanic immigrants were traffickers or rapists disappear. «Everywhere there are good people and bad people, I don’t take it the wrong way. He noticed the bad people, but he also says that there are many good people,” Miguel apologized. A few meters away, Perla Cobin stressed that her reasons for voting for the conservative candidate are not economic, but rather “the anger of seeing children in schools confused about her sex.”
The gold tooth
The hostility that Trump has felt in New York, harassed by prosecutors and despised by his own neighbors on Fifth Avenue, merged into that warm reception full of ironies. The “law and order” candidate, who promised at his rally to cleanse the city of criminals, vagrants and immigrants, invited two Brooklyn rappers accused of belonging to criminal gangs to the stage. The two artists are out on bail of up to $1 million and face charges ranging from murder to criminal possession of weapons.
Rappers Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow, during their performance in support of the Republican leader.
Reuters
![](https://s3.ppllstatics.com/rc/www/multimedia/2024/05/24/Clipboard-0146.jpg)
As soon as Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow set foot on stage, Trump noticed the shine of the gold appliqués that have become fashionable on the dentures of rappers and other music figures. «I love those teeth! “I have to find out where they are from to wear mine like this,” he exclaimed. The politician to whom the Guggenheim gave an 18-karat gold toilet could have been joking, or not, but his guests had the script very clear. «I just want to say one thing: that people always whisper your achievements and shout your failures. But Trump is going to shout our victories,” one of the guests recited meaningfully.
Their time in court links the two rappers to Trump, whose trial for 34 counts of accounting fraud must be left this week at the mercy of the jury’s deliberations. The process that began a month ago has forced him to stay in his Fifth Avenue penthouse with a frequency that he has not had since he moved his legal residence to Florida, where income taxes are not paid.
An image of the entrances to the park.
EFE
![](https://s3.ppllstatics.com/rc/www/multimedia/2024/05/24/Clipboard-0157.jpg)
From those continuous daily walks through the Big Apple, from its tower to the courthouse, in a long caravan of cars full of bodyguards, lawyers and advisors, his love for the city in which he was born and raised has resurfaced. Like a son who will never feel satisfied until he achieves his father’s approval, the magnate celebrated his return to New York at the Bronx rally. The audience responded with appreciative applause.
Their bet is to wrest control of the black and Hispanic vote from Biden, which together account for 95% of the ballots in the South Bronx. To do this, he has made stops at food stores that Latin Americans call bodegas and has recruited the national supermarket association, which is committed to displaying bilingual signs in the establishments. The former president has more than five months left in the campaign, in a career whose goal is to return to the White House, but there seems no doubt that he has started on the right foot.
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