Donald Trump Will Never Be Done With New York
Sunday’s rally at Madison Square Garden, the self-styled “world’s most famous arena,” is a remarkable gambit, even by the former president’s standards — and a show of force.
The seven-decade marriage between Donald J. Trump and New York City, like all of his most volatile relationships, was never going to end quietly.
Rejection at the ballot box would not be the final word. Decampment to Florida — another septuagenarian Manhattanite in nominal retirement down south — would not disappear him in earnest.
Felony convictions? Reconcilable differences, it seems, for one evening anyway.
On Sunday, Mr. Trump is bringing his presidential campaign to Madison Square Garden, the brashest stop in a final election stretch that has showcased the race-baiting, bravado and grievance-soaked distortions that defined much of his New York life and have only been amplified since he left.
The appearance is a remarkable gambit even by his standards — a show of force at “the world’s most famous arena,” to use the venue’s own Trumpian superlative.
More than anything, though, it is a reminder, a provocation, a warning: New York will never be rid of him entirely.
And he will never be done with New York.
“To him,” said George Arzt, a veteran of city politics who first met Mr. Trump in the 1970s, “this is a conquest.”
If recent years have doubled as a series of faceoffs between the former president and his former city — the voters versus Mr. Trump, the local politicians versus Mr. Trump, The People v. Mr. Trump — this election stands as perhaps the eternal tiebreaker.
Mr. Trump’s defeat would not end his winding arc with New York, but it would make it easier for the city to banish him from thought at least occasionally.
His victory, by contrast, would position him once more as the vengeance-seeking specter idling above the skyline, a keeper of federal dollars that the city needs and of mental ledgers that he would never wipe clean as president.
“I have been treated very badly by the political leaders of both the city and state,” Mr. Trump said in 2019, announcing himself a permanent resident of Florida (primarily for tax reasons, people close to him say). “I hated having to make this decision, but in the end it will be best for all concerned.”
For much of Mr. Trump’s pre-presidency life, his social calendar could read as a guided tour of estimable New York landmarks.
He watched Yankees games from George Steinbrenner’s box. He swaggered among the famous and infamous at the East 68th Street townhouse where his lawyer, Roy Cohn, resided and presided. He owned the Plaza Hotel, put his first wife in charge of renovations and later married his second wife there.
For Mr. Trump, whose sensibility can still be suspended in his greed-is-good heyday, latent affection for a bygone New York has persisted.
“Still in his blood,” said Andrew Stein, a friend of Mr. Trump’s and a former New York City Council president.
But on matters of his hometown, that blood has mostly boiled for some time.
He has lashed out at Letitia James, the state attorney general, over a more than $450 million civil fraud judgment against him. He has thrashed Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, over the 34 felony convictions in his hush-money case, looking miserable through much of the trial, which compelled Mr. Trump to spend more time in the city than he had in years.
Still, relations with some prominent New Yorkers seem to have thawed. Far from being roundly rejected by the city’s elite, Mr. Trump has coaxed support from several major business figures, like the investor Paul Singer, a previous holdout.
He has even found common cause with the beleaguered mayor, Eric Adams, since Mr. Adams’s federal indictment, saying without evidence that he, too, had been “persecuted by the D.O.J. for speaking out against open borders.” (Despite a past endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, a fellow Democrat, Mr. Adams has been conspicuously disinclinedto distance himself from Mr. Trump’s gestures of solidarity.)
While Mr. Trump has said he plans to compete in New York — and some polling has suggested a closer race than in his past campaigns — Democrats have dismissed his event as an exercise in hubris.
They have also invoked a 1939 pro-Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden while pointing out that Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, said that Mr. Trump meets the definition of a fascist and had repeatedly praised Adolf Hitler. (Mr. Trump’s team has condemned the rally comparison and Mr. Kelly. Mr. Trump told Fox News that he was “just the opposite” of Hitler.)
Despite its reputation for big-city liberalism, New York is hardly Republican-free. Before 2014, the city went two decades without a Democrat leading City Hall. Several pockets, especially across Staten Island, are exceedingly Trump-friendly.
In May, chants of “Build the wall!” filled a park in the Bronx for Mr. Trump’s first New York rally in eight years.
“Every athlete wants to play in front of their home crowd,” said Joseph Borelli, the Republican minority leader of the City Council.
And by now, there are few new experiences Mr. Trump seems interested in pursuing.
He has been an executive and played one on television. He has been president and would like to be again.
He has been a New Yorker and a lapsed New Yorker, at least until his mind wandered to a venue he had never filled — in a city that might never accept him but will, if he has his way, never escape him, either.
“This is a Queens boy,” Mr. Arzt said, “who thinks that if he comes to Manhattan, this is the world, and he’s conquering the world.”
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