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Excerpt from www.vanityfair.com
There are political reasons for Donald Trump to hold a campaign rally in the Bronx. Some are even plausible. Polls have shown that his general election opponent, current president Joe Biden, is struggling to assemble support from voters of color, an essential part of Biden’s winning 2020 coalition. So appearing on Thursday night in the borough’s Crotona Park, a neighborhood with a predominantly Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Black population, allows Trump to highlight a Biden weakness and advertise himself as an alternative—though his actual audience is very much elsewhere. Four years ago, Biden won this county by about 68% of the vote, and Trump has no real hope of winning the Bronx, much less New York state, this time around.
Still, the fact that the rally will happen within easy reach of America’s densest concentration of reporters should generate cheap and wide coverage for Trump (yes, including this story). The Bronx rally is the latest and largest in a series of local Trump stunts. My favorite so far was the ex-president’s motorcade rolling up to a midtown Manhattan firehouse so Trump could wave to the cameras and redeliver a pair of (cold) pizzas delivered by his staff a half hour earlier. Trump has also visited a Harlem bodega where, two years ago, a clerk fatally stabbed a customer who jumped over the store counter and shoved him. Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, ultimately dropped second-degree murder charges after concluding that the clerk could have been acting in self-defense.