Though he lost the state by a large margin in the 2020 presidential election, former President Donald Trump held a rally in the Bronx — a northern NYC borough — on Thursday.
While there, he furthered the strange, right-wing obsession with attacking big cities as though the problems that do appear there aren’t shared by communities around the United States. Though the trend in the Right’s rhetoric has continued since some claimed areas were outright burned down during sometimes violent demonstrations in 2020, America’s big cities aren’t actually hotspots of apocalyptic devastation — which is barely an exaggeration of what right-wing political figures claim sometimes.
“Right now, you don’t have public spaces,” Trump claimed Thursday to the crowd in New York City. “They’re occupied by migrants in tents. Pleasures as simple as a walk in the park or watching your children again play in a little league game will come roaring back, and they’re going to come back very quickly.”
“Trump claimed NYers “don’t have public spaces” because of migrants, that we can’t walk in parks or watch little league games,” replied Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, a local government official. “He said this in the middle of a 127-acre park that gets 1000s of visitors a day, has 5 baseball fields & an active little league.”
Trump’s intense fear-mongering about migrants, though, is consistent and obsessive. “A new category of crime is developing in New York City, and America itself, and it is bigger and more violent than anything seen in decades. It’s called BIDEN MIGRANT CRIME, and it will be really dangerous and BAD. Good luck, everyone, you’ll need it!” he claimed on social media in February of this year, though there is no conclusive data tying the recent arrivals of migrants in the city to surges of criminal activity. Anecdotes don’t equal a trend.
