Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump vowed to restore the economy for black and Hispanic New Yorkers during a campaign rally in the Bronx last month as the presumptive Republican nominee hopes to peel away minority support from President Joe Biden.
The May 23 rally at Crotona Park in the South Bronx was the former president’s first major campaign event in New York since he first ran for president in 2016.
Trump repeatedly blasted the Biden administration for fueling inflation, rising crime, and the illegal immigration crisis, all of which have hit low-income communities like those in the Bronx the hardest.
Trump told the crowd that Biden had failed the Bronx, New York State, and the country, adding that black and Hispanic Americans “are getting slaughtered” by the president’s economic and immigration policies.
The Republican candidate vowed that he would “throw out Bidenomics” on “Day One” and said he would “rapidly rebuild the greatest economy in the history of the world.”
According to a Trump campaign official, several factors went into the decision to hold a rally in the Bronx, including Trump’s long history with New York and the campaign’s efforts to sway minority voters.
The former president has suggested that he could take New York state in November, a heavy lift in a state that no Republican presidential candidate has won since Ronald Reagan in 1984.
In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper just hours before the Bronx rally kicked off, New York Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul dismissed Trump’s efforts to reach out to New York voters, saying the Bronx rally “won’t make a difference at all.”
Hochul said that “ringleader” Trump inviting “all his clowns” to the South Bronx wouldn’t change the fact that New York would never support him. She insisted that her state was “solidly behind Joe Biden” in 2024 just as it was in 2020.