By admin 
NEW YORK – Most speakers with the former president Donald TrumpThe rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday focused their fire on the vice president Kamala Harris and the various national issues they consider its weaknesses.
But among the handful of colorful speakers from the New York City area, there was a strong undercurrent of reactionary anger in the suburbs over the city’s decline – whether due to an increase in crime, or a vaguer complaint that could easily be interpreted as nostalgia for a while. when the city’s political elite looked and sounded a little more like the angry voices on radio talk shows.
These are the kind of people Trump came into contact with during his tabloid heyday in the 1980s, when he financed full-page newspaper ads calling for reintroduce the death penalty for the since-acquitted Central Park Five, a group of young black and Latino men accused of brutal rape and murder.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani used his speech Sunday to wax nostalgic about the reduction in crime and the number of wins for the New York Yankees under his watch. He also made a racist rant about the Palestinians.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
When Trump uses his comments during the Al Smith charity dinner to call progressive former Mayor Bill de Blasio a “terrible mayor” – “That’s not a comedy, by the way. That’s a fact” – he’s speaking to the aging, far-right quintile of the city’s residents, and their friends in the crime-ridden suburbs.
It echoes Trump’s scathing assessments of Detroit and Milwaukee, although unlike those cities, New York is not in a swing state, so Sunday’s affair felt more like an airing of grievances for their own sake.
Leader of the pack was undoubtedly Sid Rosenberg, the conservative host of 77 WABC’s morning drive show “Sid and Friends.”
“Look at my city: Yes, this building is beautiful. You are all beautiful. Look at you!” He declared in his hoarse voice. “But you can’t walk out here after ten o’clock at night if you’re a beautiful woman, like my beautiful wife, Danielle, out there somewhere. You get a slap in the face when you walk down the street!”
“I’ll tell you, this is not the New York I grew up in.”
– Steve Witkoff, real estate investor
“Who did that? Bill de Blasio, Eric Adams – crappy Democratic mayors. Andrew Cuomo, Kathy Hochul – crappy Democratic governors,” he continued. “You have homeless people and veterans – Americans, Americans – sleeping in their own feces on a bench in Central Park, but those damn illegals get what they want!”
Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor, was more cryptic in his comments about the state of the city in which he spoke.
“This city shaped who I am, helped me build my business and gave me my roots. But I’ll tell you, this is not the New York I grew up in,” Witkoff said. “Our city has drifted from what it once was, but if there is one man who can restore it to its greatness, it is my dear friend, President Donald J. Trump.”
Melania Trumpthe former first lady, suggested that New York City residents were leaving because of crime evidence suggests the biggest factor for those leaving is the high cost of housing.
“Crime is increasing while public safety is decreasing, creating an environment where families with young children are choosing to move,” she said. “And this story is repeating itself from coast to coast across our country.”
And of course, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor turned disgraced Trump aide, received a hero’s welcome when he was introduced to the public as “America’s Mayor” — a nickname he earned after the September 11 attacks 2001. Not used on a large scale for over ten years.
“As mayor, you know I have reduced crime more than any mayor in history,” Giuliani boasted, prompting loud applause from the crowd. “I have improved the quality of life in the five boroughs. I cut taxes. It was the largest tax cut in New York history – not like Donald Trump’s tax cut, but not that big. Do you know why it was the largest? It was the only one” in city history.
Giuliani’s nostalgia for his two terms as mayor extended to the New York Yankees’ victories in four Major League Baseball world championships, which he jokingly took credit for and used as a jumping-off point to convince his successors. In the currently ongoing World Series, the Yankees are two games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“Do you think they need my help now? What the hell does Adams know about baseball? And De Blasio is so stupid, he doesn’t know anything,” Giuliani said.
New York City is no longer safe for women to walk around at night, according to right-wing radio host Sid Rosenberg. Considering the number of women walking through downtown Manhattan after the rally, this claim stretched credulity.
ANGELA WEISS/Getty Images
Giuliani’s comments struck a chord with Phillip Kraese, a union steamfitter from Huntington, New York, and his friend Kristin Uvaydov, a nurse from Massapequa, both towns on Long Island. Kraese said he notices a higher number of unhoused people and beggars than before when he arrives at Penn Station for early morning construction work.
“It’s gotten so much worse and that’s why the whole crowd really went crazy when Rudy Giuliani came out,” Uvaydov said.
“He cleaned up the city,” Kraese interjected, prompting Uvaydov to repeat the assessment verbatim.
Another hallmark of reactionary political thinking in New York City that was evident at the meeting was a September 11-oriented form of Islamophobia.
Howard Lutnick, co-chairman of Trump’s transition team, was president of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald when the firm, located on the upper floors of the World Trade Center, lost more than 600 employees on September 11, 2001.
“So first of all, we must elect Donald J. Trump as president because we must crush jihad!” Lutnick bellowed after recounting the horrors his company endured 23 years ago.
Giuliani, a staunch Israel hawk, also took the opportunity to characterize Palestinians in racist terms in his remarks on Sunday.
“The Palestinians are taught to kill us when they are two years old.”
-Rudy Giuliani
“The Palestinians are taught to kill us when they are two years old. They don’t want a Palestinian in Jordan. They don’t want a Palestinian in Egypt. And Harris wants to bring them to you,” Giuliani claimed. ‘Maybe they have good people. I’m sorry – I won’t take any chances with people who learned to kill Americans at the age of two.”
“I am on Israel’s side,” he continued. “Donald Trump is on the side of Israel, and they are on the side of the terrorists.”
In fact, Harris has pledged to continue providing military aid to Israel without additional conditions — a position that has done just that cost her the support of Arab-American activists and elected officials – and has no plan to expand the number of Palestinians eligible to immigrate to the United States.
The reality of crime in New York City is also more complicated than the picture painted by speakers at the Madison Square Garden rally.
Like other metro areas across the country, New York City experienced a large increase in violent crime in late 2020 and 2021. But the murders, shootings, burglaries, transit crimes and many other crimes in the city have decreased significantly in the past two years. And even before the current decline, the recent increase in crime never reached its peak in the early 1990s, when the city first elected Giuliani.
That doesn’t mean that quality of life issues have returned to pre-pandemic levels — or that persistent perceptions about crime, amplified by right-wing media, haven’t made it a politically potent issue, especially in the suburbs of the city. Concerns about public safety – and the related issue of criminal justice reform at the state level – played a role Republicans‘ taking over four seats in the House of Representatives in 2022.
For his part, Trump has long pointed to urban crime rates as a reason to vote for him, especially for people of color who are often most affected by crime in their neighborhoods. “New York has gone to hell. Vote Trump!” he posted on social media in October 2020.
But as Trump continued to demagogue about crime nationally on Sunday, falsely claiming that ABC News’ David Muir had lied about FBI statistics Showing a decline in crime, he took a softer approach than many of the speakers who came before him when discussing New York City’s specific challenges.
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“No city better embodies the spirit, energy and potential of the American people than where we gather tonight. We want to win our country, but we also want to win New York and make it safe and strong and beautiful and important and vibrant again,” he said. “And we’re going to do that, and we’re going to work with the mayor, and we’re going to work with the governor.”