Donald Trump receives rousing reception in South Bronx rally
Donald Trump has infuriated Democrats by using his time out of court to appear at a campaign rally in the left-wing New York stronghold of The Bronx.
Donald Trump has infuriated Democrats by using his time out of court to appear at a campaign rally before more than 10,000 supporters in the left-wing New York stronghold of The Bronx, a district Republicans have not won since the 1980s.
The Republican presidential candidate, who spent most of the past three weeks in a Manhattan courtroom on election interference charges, spoke for more than an hour on Thursday afternoon (Friday AEST) on a fine spring day in South Bronx, a region that voted more than 80 per cent for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
Mr Trump regaled the audience of diehard fans, who had waited for hours to enter the park, about his devotion to New York, his contribution to the city’s skyline, and his affection for black and Hispanic people, who make up more than 80 per cent of the low-income borough.
“New York was where you came to make it big. You want to make it big, you had to be in New York,” he said to cheers of “four more years”.
“But sadly, this is now a city in decline.”
The former president, who turns 78 next month, dwelt on his trademark criticisms of the incumbent President’s age, criticising 81-year-old Mr Biden for stoking inflation and turning a blind eye to the millions of undocumented immigrants who have crossed the southern border from Mexico since 2021.
d chants of “build the wall”, a reference to Republican efforts to extend a wall on the southern border, Mr Trump said he would “send them back”, a reference to more than nine million undocumented immigrants who have crossed the US border since Mr Biden came to power in January 2021.
“I woke up, I said, ‘I wonder, will it be hostile or will it be friendly? It was beyond friendly. It was a love fest,” Mr Trump said of the rally.
Mr Trump’s decision to campaign in The Bronx, a district not won by Republicans in a presidential contest since Ronald Reagan in 1980, rather than a battleground state, such as Michigan or Arizona, pointed to the confidence of the Trump campaign less than six months out from the November 5 presidential election.
“African-Americans are getting slaughtered. Hispanic Americans are getting slaughtered,” Mr Trump told his audience.
The rally came a day after his erstwhile chief adversary for the Republican nomination, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, conceded she would vote for Mr Trump, whom she had previous derided as “unhinged” and an agent of chaos.
National polls, including a respected New York Times/Siena poll, have put the former president ahead of Mr Biden in almost all the key battleground states in recent months, despite constraints on his ability to campaign owing to the more than month-long trial in Manhattan over hush-money payments he made in 2016 to porn star Stormy Daniels, which required his attendance.
For the first since Mr Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency in late 2022, the average of eight political betting markets tracked by RealClearPolitics gives the former president a more than 50 per cent chance of being re-elected in November, compared to Mr Biden’s 38 per cent.
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