“I cannot have a fair trial in New York,” complained Donald Trump, who this Tuesday appeared before a judge to hear the charges that will lead him to sit on the bench in his hometown, which has always been hostile to him despite the fact that it was here that he built his fortune and his legend.
His surprise election in November 2016 for the US presidency was very poorly received in Manhattan, where protesters let him know that “New York hates Trump.”
At the time, the New York Times and the BBC analyzed “the love” of the 45th US president for this megalopolis that “does not love him”, a city where Trump “hates to be hated”.
When he arrived at his Trump Tower on legendary 5th Avenue on Monday afternoon for his historic appearance before Colombian judge Juan Merchán, the billionaire had to settle for a handful of supporters declaring “We love Trump!” (“We love Trump!”) at the foot of his sumptuous skyscraper.
For a narcissist like him, he sure as hell didn’t appreciate the banners calling for “lock him up” and “throw away the key.”
immigrant city
According to Brian Arbour, a professor of political science, the “main reason for the dislike” of New Yorkers for Trump is mainly because it is “a city of immigrants.”
in this extraordinary cultural mosaic of 8.5 million inhabitants “Many are immigrants or their parents or grandparents were, and they are still attached to their roots,” this professor at John Jay College of the City University of New York (CUNY) told AFP.
Thus, his “anti-immigration policies” and his “harsh, incendiary and racist rhetoric are particularly disastrous in a city where so many inhabitants believe that dynamism and growth emanates from foreign communities,” Arbor stresses.
Politically, New York is a “deeply Democratic city for a century,” according to Arbor, as confirmed by the election of former left-wing mayor Bill de Blasio (2014-2021), who was replaced on January 1, 2022 by another a Democrat a little further to the right, former African-American police officer Eric Adams.
Although the “Republicans have done better” in the city and in the more rural and conservative state of New York, in the last midterm elections, in November, it was due “mainly to the issue of insecurity,” analyzes the teacher.
The history
Born in the popular county of Queens on June 14, 1946, Donald J. Trump grew up in a background of Protestant European immigration: his father Fred Trump, born in 1905 in the Bronx, was the son of a German immigrant and his mother , Mary Anne MacLeod, was born in 1912 in Scotland.
Educated at a military school, he started working in the family business after finishing his business studies. But contrary to the legend that has been created, there is nothing “self-made man” about him. After World War II, his father had created a real estate empire in New York by building apartments for the middle class in poor neighborhoods.
Donald Trump took over the reins of the company in the 1970s with solid parental financial supportbefore becoming a television star thanks to the famous broadcast of the game show “The Apprentice”.
In her biography published in 2022 (“Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America”), the political reporter for the New York Times Maggie Haberman writes that the “dynamics that defined New York in the 1980s sculpted and marked Donald Trump for decades. As if frozen in time.”
In an article in September, the New York newspaper deciphered its journalist’s thesis: “You cannot really understand Donald Trump unless you are familiar with the vaporous, theatrical and histrionic usages and codes of the New York political and economic scene.” .
Fuente: AFP
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