Trump Won More of New York’s Votes. Did He Win More of Its Love, Too?
"The city tolerated Donald J. Trump, and then it loathed him. Now, some New Yorkers have begun to embrace him. The Kid from Queens couldn’t be happier.
Even though Donald J. Trump is cloistered in Florida and planning his return to Washington, it seems like he has been stuck in a New York state of mind.
He went out of his way to throw rallies in the Bronx, Nassau County and at Madison Square Garden, and then, after winning the election, he went right back to the Garden to watch a fight there. He has been uncharacteristically friendly toward the governor and both of the state’s senators (and they have been uncharacteristically friendly back). He keeps talking about how he wants to fix the subways and rebuild Penn Station. The Trump Organization just announced it is trying to get back control of Wollman Rink in Central Park. And he has been stocking his new administration with New Yorkers (Elise Stefanik, Lee Zeldin, Howard Lutnick).
This thaw follows a decade-long freeze in which Mr. Trump was reviled in his hometown. During his presidency, his very name became tantamount to a curse in Manhattan. He could barely step foot on the island without protests erupting. In 2019, he and his wife, Melania, officially switched their residence to Palm Beach, Fla. But those who know him say he never really became a Florida man.
“He’s a New Yorker — that’s what he is, that’s the first thing he is,” said Cindy Adams, a longtime New York Post columnist and Trump confidante. The president-elect is such a New Yorker, she said, that he even has a special phone line that can be reached only by “a few super New Yorkers” he trusts. Naturally, she is one of them. “I just talked to him on his private number,” she said. “I call him, and he answers it automatically. Nobody else answers that phone.”
John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes grocery store chain who has known Mr. Trump for many years, said simply: “I think he misses New York.”
He pointed out that Mr. Trump’s son Barron just started school in the city. “He could have sent him to the University of Miami,” Mr. Catsimatidis said. “Why did he send him to N.Y.U.?” He said that becoming such a hated figure in the city definitely got to Mr. Trump. “He was disappointed that New York didn’t love him back,” he said.
And what about now?
New York may not exactly love him back, but it certainly has feelings for him.
He won 30 percent of the votes cast for president in the city this month, a seven-point jump from last time. In a place so disproportionately affected by Covid and crime spikes and the migrant crisis, it turned out there was a lot about Mr. Trump’s pitch that connected. New Yorkers rich and poor turned out for him, and the stigma of backing him no longer seems as strong as it once was. There’s MAGA merchandise being sold in Times Square and on Canal Street. The mayor is yukking it up with him ringside at the Garden. He is hovering over the city as a parade float on this week’s cover of New York magazine, whose story is headlined: “How Even This City Swung Hard Toward Trump.” Are we at the point where people would start to clap if Mr. Trump walked into the Polo Bar on a Saturday night?
The Rev. Al Sharpton has been tangling with Mr. Trump for decades — “We have fought more than we have agreed,” he said, “but we have known each other”— and figures he’s got his number by now. He explained that this latest “romance we’re seeing” between Mr. Trump and New York goes back to Mr. Trump’s original insecurity of “being an outer-borough guy from Queens” who just wants to be accepted by the city, even still.
Mr. Sharpton put it this way: “They indicted him, convicted him, but it’s like, ‘Look at me now!’ I think it’s like the girl in high school that turned you down for the prom. You always want to say, what about me now? And I think that’s what he’s going through. I think he sincerely wants to try to be embraced by this town.”
Last month, Mr. Trump mixed with Manhattan power players and partisan foes alike at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in Midtown. Several attendees said afterward that they were shocked at the way Mr. Trump behaved backstage — very nicely.
Onstage, he praised Senators Chuck Schumer (“He’s a good man actually, I hate to say it”) and Kirsten Gillibrand (“Thank you very much for working hard”), as well as Gov. Kathy Hochul (“Good job. It’s not an easy one, is it? But you’re doing all right. We have to get a little money from the federal government.”)
But how long can such niceties last? It wasn’t his outer-borough status that made Mr. Trump abhorred by so many New Yorkers last time. It was his policies and rhetoric and conduct. And not much has changed there. “I think he has the chance, but, knowing him, he’ll blow it with deportations and all,” Mr. Sharpton said.
When Mr. Trump was president, it sometimes seemed as if he were out to punish the city that had made him. He derailed the $30 billion infrastructure project known as Gateway, which would have funded new rail tunnels between New York and New Jersey, and spent years describing the place as a lawless hellhole. Might he take a different tack toward the city this time around, now that he knows he has more voters here? And, in turn, might the people who run New York take a different approach with him now that they’ve learned he is not as hated here as they assumed?
“Whether we like it or not, we’re stuck with him,” said Ken Sunshine, the public relations pro who once worked as a chief of staff to Mayor David Dinkins. “Look,” Mr. Sunshine added, sounding skeptical, “I’d like nothing more than for him to shock people like me and my crowd and actually do some good things for New York.”
Mr. Sharpton recalled a telling exchange with his old frenemy in the days after the 2016 election.
Mr. Sharpton went on MSNBC one morning to try to explain Mr. Trump’s victory to a stunned nation. “I said, ‘You have to understand Donald Trump as a New Yorker,’” Mr. Sharpton said. He went on to give his theory about the Kid from Queens, saying that Mr. Trump, privileged though he may be, was somehow able to extrapolate his lifelong feeling of being an outsider to many people around the country who also felt looked down upon by elites.
Mr. Sharpton said that a short while later his phone began to ring. The number was not familiar to him, so he didn’t answer it.
The phone kept ringing. Finally, he picked it up. “The lady said, ‘The president-elect would like to speak to you,’” Mr. Sharpton remembered, “and he comes on the phone, and he says, ‘Al! I saw you this morning. You got me.’”
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