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Ahead of Donald Trump’s scheduled campaign rally on Thursday in Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres’ South Bronx district, the representative wrote an op-ed for the New York Daily News that accurately captures the mendacity of Trump’s visit.
Torres wrote:
“Even before inciting an insurrection against the United States Congress on Jan. 6, Trump fundamentally failed the American people with presidential malfeasance and mismanagement. Nowhere has this failure been more deeply felt than in the Bronx, where Covid-19 left a death toll of more than 7,000 — greater than the combined death count of Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Trump’s catastrophic mismanagement of the global pandemic brought preventable death and devastation to the Bronx, which is still reeling from the aftershocks of Covid. Instead of holding a rally at Crotona Park, Trump owes the Bronx an apology for the lasting damage he has done.
I often find myself at odds with Torres, who’s become known for his attacks on progressives critical of Israel’s government; but on this point, Torres is right. Trump’s NYC visits — both his staged photo-op at a Harlem bodega earlier this year and his South Bronx rally — show him passing through communities devastated by his ignorance, cruelty and bigotry.
Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic — and his particular scorn for local officials, who desperately pleaded with him for help — helped make two of the poorest parts of New York City, the South Bronx and Harlem, into two of the deadliest places in the city.
Sometimes it can feel like many people have memory-holed this. Perhaps that’s because they want to forget the worst aspects of that traumatic period. Or maybe it’s because they’ve adopted the Trump administration’s ableist excuse that Covid deaths among marginalized groups can be blamed on personal behaviors rather than failed leadership.
But as someone who lived in Harlem during much of the pandemic, the memories of ambulance sirens blaring through the night and funeral homes reaching capacity are etched in my mind forever. So are the cruel remarks Trump made as it was all playing out.
I don’t think I’m alone.
So in my view, Trump’s visits serve two goals. They’re staged events, coordinated by the extremist New York Young Republicans Club, to give the impression that the MAGA movement has seen a surge in nonwhite voters in recent years — a claim that we have ample reason to question. (Note that Trump’s Harlem event was held in a district where voters overwhelmingly backed city Councilman Yusef Salaam, the man who, when he was a teenager, Trump said deserved execution for a crime it was later proved he didn’t commit. And Trump's latest Bronx visit brings him to a district that favored Biden by nearly 70 points in 2020.)
But beyond New York, Trump is visiting cities where his decisions, particularly around Covid-19, have fueled death and despair. Evidently, he and his campaign think some shots of cheering crowds will be enough to paper over that.