Sunday 01 November 2020
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Donald Trump is a New Yorker through and through. With his Trump Tower he helped shape the face of the city. Since his election as president, the relationship between Trump and the city’s residents has deteriorated – with no prospect of improvement.
Officially, Donald Trump is no longer a New Yorker. Last September, the US President, who was born in Queens in New York in 1946 and has spent much of his life in the metropolis, applied to move his residence to Florida. Since then, he and First Lady Melania have officially lived, apart from the White House in Washington, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Golf Club in Palm Beach.
“I was very reluctant to make this decision,” Trump wrote on Twitter at the time. “I will always be there when New York and its great people need my help. It will always have a special place in my heart.” The political leadership of the city and the state of the same name treated him “very badly” and left him no other choice. And they governed just as badly, Trump stepped in a few months later: “New York is going to hell right now.”
The relationship between the Republican US president and his liberal hometown is complicated. On the one hand, the metropolis has made Trump what he is – on the other hand, the affection has probably never really been reciprocal and has turned into open rejection and hatred by a large part of the population since his election as president. But the US president still has ardent supporters in his hometown.
Trump’s grandparents had emigrated from Germany. His grandmother founded the real estate company Elizabeth Trump & Son in 1925, a forerunner of today’s Trump Organization. Trump’s father got rich in the metropolis with huge apartment buildings and old people’s homes. Donald grew up in the rather humble and very international district of Queens. The house of his childhood has been offered for sale several times since he took office and in between was also bookable via the rental company Airbnb.
Trump was drawn to the glittering real estate world of Manhattan early on, where he built a tower right in the middle of posh Fifth Avenue in the early 1980s. The inclusion in the elite of New York’s high society, which always smiled at him a little, has long been a driving motivation for Trump, my observer. Until he moved to the White House, he lived in Trump Tower in a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park.
“New York hates you”
After winning the election in 2016, which the newly elected president celebrated in a luxury hotel in Midtown Manhattan, crowds of people gathered in front of that building for weeks and yelled upwards: “New York hates you” (New York hates you). Many New Yorkers booed Trump when he cast his vote in a school in Midtown – but others also cheered him on.
The vast majority of New Yorkers voted for Trump’s Democratic rival Hilary Clinton in the 2016 election – but by no means all. Clinton won the state of New York with 59 percent of the vote, Trump got 36.5. Clinton won four of the five boroughs of New York City by a huge margin: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Trump only won in Staten Island, which is more like a suburb.
Four years later, for the next presidential election, signs and stickers for the democratic candidate, this time ex-Vice-President Joe Biden, predominate in most streets of the metropolis. The views of many New Yorkers – for climate protection and for the protection of immigrants, for example – seem to be diametrically opposed to Trump’s.
Tough patch for Trump supporters
The relationship between New York and Trump has worsened in the past four years, says bank employee Hanna, who is out with her dog in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. “In the beginning we were all shocked that he was really elected, but we thought maybe things won’t be that bad. Deep down he might be a New Yorker after all. But then he turned out to be a real monster. We have to deselect him. ”
Biden supporters are often offensive on the streets of New York, for example with a corresponding label on the mask. For Gavin Wax, on the other hand, it often seems as if he has to keep a secret – because the 26-year-old native of New York is a conservative Trump supporter. “Here there is a monopoly on political discourse, and if you have other views that are right of the center, you are basically called a fascist,” says the president of the New York Young Republican Club – the Republican youth organization, so to speak in the east coast metropolis. As a Trump supporter, Wax doesn’t feel like a completely outcast, but: “I have to be quiet in any case and can’t be as public as I want.”
The anti-Trump voices, on the other hand, are usually much louder in the metropolis – and even come from the very top. “Donald Trump must be stopped”, demands the democratic mayor of the city, Bill de Blasio, whom Trump in turn likes to refer to as the “worst mayor in the USA”. “Because he doesn’t understand New York City, and if his presidency is over very soon, he won’t be welcome in New York City either,” said de Blasio.
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