OPINION:
NEW YORK — Under smiling skies last Thursday night, former President Donald Trump ventured far beyond Yankee Stadium into a tough Democratic neighborhood in the South Bronx to be greeted by an adoring, enthusiastic crowd waving red, white and blue.
Standing on a low platform at the crest of a hill overlooking Crotona Park, Mr. Trump talked about prosperity and possibility and the hope for a brighter future.
“We’re going to make New York bigger, better and more beautiful than ever before,” he promised. “And that includes right here in the Bronx!”
Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Trump showed up in a neighborhood that hasn’t voted Republican in many lifetimes. And he respectfully asked the people of the Bronx to vote for him.
The last Republican to campaign here was Ronald Reagan in 1980. He didn’t win Crotona Park. But he won the state of New York.
“Thank you, everybody. What a crowd!” Mr. Trump said as the audience cheered and waved homemade posters bearing Mr. Trump’s mug shot from one of the five court cases Democrats are hoping will keep him from winning reelection to the White House.
“We wanted to keep it small, but — who knew? — this is a love fest!”
The crowd went wild.
“Who said we’re not going to win New York?” he marveled, eight years into his unlikeliest of political careers.
Those odds are still stacked heavily against Mr. Trump in blue, blue New York, of course. But anything can happen in New York — the city Mr. Trump helped build.
His hometown, he said, is a “monumental testament to the power of the American spirit and the American dream.”
Once, New York was just wilderness and marsh from Crotona Park to nearly the tip of Manhattan, where the Dutch had staked out a small, rugged trading post.
But thanks to the “muscle and backbone and genius of the people of New York, we built this city into the towering forest of iron, aluminum, concrete and steel,” he said. “We made this city and state into the capital of global commerce. We turned our hometown into the bustling center of a confident, glamorous American culture.”
And, he said, “We inspired the entire world.”
Mr. Trump’s speech in the Bronx — and the unlikely Bronx cheer they gave him back — was most unusual in politics today, where lines are drawn, false promises are made, and expectations are set in stone.
President Biden isn’t so much running for reelection as he is on a bitter old entitlement tour. Last week he ventured to a historically Black college in Atlanta. He delivered a nasty speech full of lies about how much America hates the very graduates he was there to inspire and how much they owed him — a man who has been failing in politics for 50 years.
As Mr. Biden has said, if you don’t vote for him, “you ain’t Black.”
Mr. Biden’s only talent — and it is a remarkable one — is managing to fall UP the stairs. It is a talent crafted over a 50-year career failing upward, upward and upward until he found himself sleeping in the White House.
The Democrats who supposedly represent the Bronx in Washington were enraged that Mr. Trump had dared to come to the Bronx to ask people to consider voting for him.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez heralded thunderstorms she hoped would swamp the people of her district who lined up early to hear Mr. Trump speak.
“God is good,” she declared with a set of brown, praying hands at the news of nasty storms slamming her district.
It is true. On Thursday morning, powerful storms rolled through New York’s towering forest of concrete, glass and steel. But when the black clouds passed, the forest was still there, gleaming a little brighter, and the crowd that had already begun gathering to hear Mr. Trump speak was still there.
Among them was longtime local Bronx Democratic politician Ruben Diaz, who came on stage to endorse Mr. Trump and ripped Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.
“Madam Prophet AOC, you have become a false prophet,” he said.
Mr. Trump waxed sentimental about some of his prouder accomplishments in the New York construction world. He thanked his parents, who he said were watching from above. And he thrilled the crowd with a dramatic reading of his favored poem about the snake — a dark parable about the treachery of open borders.
“Get me the snake, please!” he called out when he realized he didn’t have the poem in his pocket.
But mostly, Mr. Trump kept it positive and hopeful — though always honest.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re Black or brown or White or whatever the hell color you are — it doesn’t matter,” he said. “We are all Americans.”
He admonished the crowd that “we are not going to abandon our hope and our pride.”
And he respectfully asked them for their vote in November, reminding them that no matter their differences, he was one of them — he is a New Yorker.
“If a New Yorker can’t save this country, no one can,” he said to riotous cheers.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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