Former President Donald Trump vowed during a recent campaign rally in the Bronx borough of New York City that he would turn the whole city “around” if he retakes the White House in the 2024 elections.
“I’m thrilled to be back in the city I grew up in, the City I spent my life in, the city I helped build, and the city that we all love, New York City,” Trump said as he opened his speech. “And I’m here tonight to declare that we are going to turn New York City around and we are going to turn it around very very quickly.”
Trump went on to vow his presidency will bring the city a renewed emphasis on public safety, improved public school performance, and prosperity for “every neighborhood and every Barrow of the greatest city in our land.”
“We’re going to reduce taxes. We’re going to bring businesses and big taxpayers back to New York—got to bring them back, got to bring them back—and we’re going to make New York bigger better and more beautiful than ever before and that includes right here in the Bronx.”
The prospective Republican presidential nominee said funding for these campaign promises will start flowing on January 20th, the prospective first day of what he hopes is his second term in the White House.
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Trump’s Thursday rally marked an effort to make inroads for Republicans in New York, a state that has long favored Democrats. The state last went to a Republican presidential candidate in 1984, and Democrats control both U.S. Senate seats and 16 of the state’s 26 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Making his case to the crowd on Thursday, Trump argued that New York’s voting trend of favoring Democrats has coincided with a declining sense of order. He said he has seen New York City in good times and bad, but never as it is now.
“We have filthy encampments of drugged-out homeless people living in our places that we’ve spent so much time with children – – where they used to play,” Trump said. “We have lunatics killing innocent bystanders by pushing them onto the railroad tracks for sport. . . Our subways are squalid and unsafe, the ceiling tiles are falling down and they look worse than a third-world country.”
He added, “The medians of our highways are crumbling, our sidewalks are littered with garbage bottles and trash, but worst of all the discarded needles from people that so desperately are in need of help. And we have mobs of migrants fighting our police officers, and giving America the middle finger.”
Despite these faults, Trump said, “This city has given us so much and now it is time that we are going to give it back.”
“Together we are going to make New York City great again and simultaneously we are going to make America great again,” Trump went on, offering a new iteration of his 2016 campaign slogan.
