Trump’s charm offensive in the Bronx

Hardly anyone in the South Bronx seemed to know he was coming. But if he did come – and people were dubious that he would – they had plenty to say to him. Trump should come and look at the addicts here at 149th and Willis Avenue, said one old man. If he could stop the cheap synthetic marijuana that was turning people into zombies, the man said, gesturing at two women trudging back and forth, he’d vote for him. “She was beautiful two years ago,” he added, pointing to one of them.

As the former president glowered and dozed through his criminal trial a few miles south in lower Manhattan, the Trump campaign emails had been growing weirder and weirder. Their subject lines were an anthology of cryptic clickbait. “I stormed out of court!” read one (he didn’t). “I nearly escaped death,” said another (if he had, then grammatically speaking he would be dead, which he pretty clearly wasn’t).

But then an email arrived with a more sober call to action: “RSVP to join President Donald J. Trump in the South Bronx, New York, on Thursday May 23rd.”

Heading uptown was a bold move for Trump and his campaign team. In 2020 four out of five voters in the Bronx, the northernmost borough of New York City, backed Joe Biden. In the South Bronx, the poorest congressional district in the country, 97% of residents are black or Latino. Clearly the campaign smelled an opportunity to capitalise on recent polls, which suggested a shift Trumpward among black and Latino voters.

Photographs would show a crowd of Trump supporters that wasn’t made up entirely of white faces, and suggest that his appeal could extend to any American who felt the government wasn’t doing them any good. (It also helped that the Bronx is just across town from the criminal trial that Trump has been obliged to attend daily.)

There was no guarantee the ploy would work, however. It was obvious that most people I talked to in the South Bronx didn’t care for the 45th president of the United States. Outside a barbershop on Third Avenue, I asked three men if they were ready for Trump’s visit.

“Here? In El Bronx? Nah, man, he can’t come in here.”

“Fuck that fool.”

“Don the Con.”

“Racist dumbass.”

“Tell him we already retired his ass. Tell Donnie, tell him from me: stay retired, Donnie. We done with you.”

There was the odd pocket of interest. “Under Trump, we weren’t paying four dollars and fifty cents for gas!” said John (he wouldn’t give his last name), the owner of House of Radiation, a shop that sold Caribbean and African spiritual paraphernalia. “You go into a grocery [store], you come out with one bag, it’s $150! The rent is too high. It seems like everything went up under Biden.”

Although John described himself as a Republican, he said he had voted for Democrats from time to time. “Obama did a good job. I think the country was bamboozled, though, they thought Biden was another Obama. But now, Biden, he just looks lost. The rest of the world is laughing at us.”

When I asked if he was planning to go to Trump’s rally in Crotona Park, John looked surprised. “He’s coming here?”

The South Bronx has long been shorthand for urban decay, crime and poverty. From the 1970s, when many buildings in the district were burned down or abandoned, to the 1980s and 1990s, as the crack-cocaine epidemic took hold (the first time the New York Times mentioned the new drug was in a story about the Bronx), the place has represented something scary and catastrophic in the American imagination. When Sherman McCoy takes a wrong turn into the South Bronx in Tom Wolfe’s novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities”, it’s a symbol of terrifying otherness. “Human existence had but one purpose: to get out of the Bronx,” Wolfe wrote.

The past two decades brought changes. New buildings and businesses sprang up and unemployment fell to a record low. Local newspapers published optimistic stories about urban renewal, and wary ones about gentrification. But covid-19 and its economic hangover hit the South Bronx hard. Unemployment and crime, especially drug-related, is rising.

Pedro Suarez grew up in the neighbourhood and runs a non-profit organisation that helps local businesses grow. “There’s a feeling in the South Bronx that we’re headed back to the Seventies and Eighties, and there’s a hopelessness and a fear. People are contemplating getting out of here again,” he said.

“Don’t get me wrong: there’s been a lot of progress. But the perception of things isn’t positive right now. So Trump is coming into the South Bronx at a time when people are scared, and when people are scared…well, communities tend to rely on cults of personality when they feel the democratic process isn’t serving them.”

On the morning of the rally, the skies above New York City opened up and let loose a tremendous downpour. On the streets, volunteers were posting fliers in the bodegas: PRESIDENTE TRUMP EN EL BRONX.

I walked from East 138th Street, through Roberto Clemente Plaza and up Third Avenue, running the gauntlet of street hawkers proffering used sneakers, hats and sunglasses; past shops advertising their wares over booming sound systems, “iPhone 12, just $600!”; then along more residential blocks before reaching Crotona Park, an expansive green space with a lake, tennis courts, sports fields and a swimming pool.

By the afternoon the sun had come out and the weather was getting steamy. About a thousand people – black, white and Latino – queued to get into the park’s open-air amphitheatre. They were thrilled and a little rowdy. Many were clad in MAGA baseball hats and cowboy hats or red visors with Trumpian manes. Their T-shirts said things like JOSE BIDEN: NO BUENO and THE DONFATHER. They waved flags with Trump’s face, Israeli flags, “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. There were MAGA rappers, a performance artist who calls herself Crackhead Barney, and around a dozen platoons of police.

There were only a handful of metal detectors, so the queue moved slowly. Waiting in a hot, sweaty scrum, a bus driver from Harlem tried to lead the crowd in the national anthem, which went pretty well, and then “I’m Proud to be American”, which didn’t. Six young guys dressed head-to-toe in MAGAwear jumped a barricade, overtaking a few hundred people. George Santos, a disgraced former congressman, tried to start a “USA! USA!” chant in the VIP lane, but it fizzled immediately. “You’re killing me, people!” he said.

Three older women – one Caribbean-American, one Italian-American, one African-American – were delighted to discover that they came from three of New York City’s five boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx) and resolved to find a Staten Island to complete the party (Manhattan was of no interest to them). Meanwhile they chattered happily about Joe Biden’s Illuminati masters and the paedophile ring he was running on behalf of Barack Obama.

Eventually they found their Staten Island, a nerdy Jewish guy with thick glasses, who agreed about the paedophile ring but felt they weren’t sufficiently outraged about it. “Don’t be so serious!” Brooklyn said merrily.

Although many of the spectators were white people who had travelled from Long Island and New Jersey, this was a far blacker and browner crowd than Trump usually draws: a lot of middle-aged and older black women, some young black men, Latino families and a few Asian-American families. There were also a good number of Orthodox Jews, mostly young men.

Trump took to the stage – preceded, as always, by the Village People’s anthems of anonymous gay sex and narcissism, “YMCA” and “Macho Man” – and the crowd went nuts. He launched into an extensive and detailed narration of several construction projects, for example, how he rescued the Wollman ice rink in Central Park (almost 40 years ago).

“They took their advice from a refrigerator company from Miami!” he said. And so he asked the Montreal Canadiens hockey club for advice, because you don’t ask people from Miami about ice, you ask Canadians, and in fact they were very nice, “and they told me you don’t want to use copper tubing and gas, because the gas is very delicate and it leaks, it’s very fragile, you want to use rubber hose…Can you imagine?”

It went on so long I wandered out towards the queue. There seemed to be a party going on round the back of the amphitheatre, getting louder as the speakers droned on. People had spread blankets and were sitting on the grass, chatting to old friends and new ones.

Having by this point had numerous conversations about paedophiles, rigged elections and microchips planted via covid vaccinations, I was relieved to meet Gabriel Cubero, a 22-year-old plumber working on a civil-engineering degree at night. He was from a Puerto Rican family and had lived in Queens till he was 12, when his family moved to Long Island.

“When I was 18, the economy was a lot better,” he said. “For me, for a lot of people my age, we look at the economy first, the job market, that’s what hits home for us. I feel like he’s the candidate that strikes home more on that. I consider myself a moderate, I always listen to both sides. But the economy is my big consideration, all the other stuff is second.”

What did he want to do with his degree? “My dream is to be a construction project manager, running the whole thing.”

“Just a guy from Queens, running construction projects, running the whole thing?” I asked.

“Well, for now I’m a plumber,” Cubero said. “But I’ve got plans.” ■

Dan Halpern is a feature writer for 1843 magazine