NEW YORK — He visits construction sites in Manhattan, denounces local crime and holds a court hearing in his gilded penthouse on Fifth Avenue.
After a years-long break with his birthplace, Donald Trump is back in New York, this time as a criminal defendant. The Queens-born presumptive GOP nominee is stuck here most weekdays during his criminal hush-money trial, conjuring up images of his old days as a celebrity developer, reality TV star and tabloid newspaper as he takes weekly stops from local campaigns as he resettles in the place that created him, voted against him twice – and may ultimately condemn him.
After leaving court Thursday, Trump made one more stop, heading to a fire station in downtown Manhattan with boxes of pizza in hand. Trump spent about ten minutes there shaking hands, posing for photos and talking with several dozen firefighters and other personnel before returning to Trump Tower for the night.
The felony trial has limited Trump’s ability to campaign across the country. But it also means Trump often spends four days a week in the nation’s media capital, with access to ready-made campaign event venues that he can use to court voters as he tries to regain the White House to win.
“While President Trump must spend the next few weeks here in Manhattan, he should take that opportunity to reach communities across the city,” said former U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Republican who challenged Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022 and lost a race which was closer than expected.
Zeldin declined to provide details about private conversations with Trump campaign aides, but noted that his gubernatorial campaign had included stops in heavily Asian American neighborhoods such as Chinatown and Flushing in Queens, Dominican communities in the south Bronx and Orthodox Jewish communities.
Although many were traditionally Democratic neighborhoods, he said, “they were excited that I showed up and talked to them about issues they cared about more than blind partisan loyalty.”
He noted that coverage of Trump’s stops extends them far beyond local businesses or community groups.
“That video that is made ends up being shared across the country,” he said.
Trump’s stops in heavily Democratic New York City sometimes felt more like a bid for mayor than an attempt to win back the White House.
Thursday’s stop at the fire station was captured by a large group of reporters and cameras across the street. Inside the station, Trump thanked staff for their service, FDNY spokesman Jim Long said. Trump had visited the same fire station, as well as an adjacent police station, when he returned to the city in 2021 after leaving office to commemorate the anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
“We appreciate everyone who supports our members at the FDNY, regardless of their political beliefs,” the FDNY said in a statement, noting that they have hosted leaders including former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Mike Pence and all of the mayors of the city over time. years.
Trump’s other visits have drawn large crowds. After the second day of jury selection, the former president was taken by motorcade to a bodega in a largely Latino section of Harlem, where hundreds of supporters and onlookers gathered behind police barricades to catch a glimpse.
The visit to the bodega, where a violent crime had occurred, also gave Trump an opportunity to rail against the prosecutor who oversaw the hush-money case. Alvin Bragg faced backlash after filing murder charges against a store clerk who stabbed a customer to death in apparent self-defense. The charges were eventually dropped.
Last week, Trump visited the site of an unfinished skyscraper — not his own — to shake hands with cheering construction workers, sign hats and helmets and pose for photos with hard hats and steel beams in the background.
The image harkens back to his roots as a developer and to an era when he was a fixture in the city. He often appeared on the covers of New York’s cutthroat tabloids discussing projects that featured his name in large gold letters.
“We built a lot of great buildings in the city with these people,” Trump said at the stop.
Trump has also used his landmark Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue to host meetings with foreign leaders preparing for a possible second Trump term, including former Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso and Polish President Andrzej Duda.
Trump, who officially became a Florida resident in 2019, had spent little time in New York after taking office in 2017. He visited only a handful of times as president and officially left for his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida after his departure. the White House in 2021.
When he announced in 2019 that he would make Florida his official home, he said in a post on Twitter – now X – that he would always “cherish” New York, “but unfortunately, despite paying millions of dollars in city, state and local taxes every year, I have been treated very poorly by the political leaders of both the city and the state.” He later told the New York Post that he had largely avoided the city as president to avoid the heavy traffic with his presidential motorcade.
That meant leaving most of Trump Tower, where he filmed “The Apprentice” and later hosted the 2016 campaign launch, which he entered via the escalator. After his surprise victory, reporters camped out in the building’s lobby for weeks as Trump paraded past a White House line. hopefuls through the lobby, along with celebrities like Kanye West.
Trump had long told aides he wanted to campaign in his hometown, insisting he had a chance to win even though New York remains overwhelmingly Democratic. In 2020, President Joe Biden defeated him with 60% of the vote.
In addition to his unannounced stops at local businesses, Trump has also discussed holding rallies in the south Bronx and at one of the city’s most famous locations, Madison Square Garden.
“We’re going to have a big rally, honoring the police and the firefighters and everyone, and honoring a lot of people, including teachers, by the way,” he said after the court hearing last week. “We honor teachers because teachers have been very much vilified by very poor leadership. But we honor the people who make New York work. And we are going to do some big rallies, it will be very exciting.”
And he has increasingly intervened in local news events, including calling his friend Sean Hannity’s primetime Fox News show as a police raid was underway to remove and arrest pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University.
“We are going to strike a blow against New York,” Trump said last month during the visit to the bodega in Harlem. “I love this city and it’s gotten so bad in the last three or four years, and we’re going to fix New York.”
He also said there were advantages to being stuck in the city.
“It gets me campaigning locally,” he said, his New York accent even more evident as he added, “I think there’s more press here than if I went to a nice location.”