Trump holds campaign rally in the Bronx as he seeks to make inroads with Hispanic and Black voters

Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to hold a rally Thursday in the Bronx as his campaign looks to make inroads with Hispanic and Black voters ahead of November’s election.

The event in one of the most Democratic counties in the country comes days ahead of closing arguments in Trump’s New York criminal hush money trial. Trump faces 34 felony counts and has pleaded not guilty.

The trial has tethered the former president to New York for much of the past six weeks, but Thursday’s event in Cortona Park in the South Bronx will be Trump’s first major campaign rally in the state since his initial presidential run in 2016. Trump has visited a bodega, which was the scene of a fatal stabbing in 2022, a construction site and a fire station in Manhattan since his trial began in mid-April.

A Trump campaign official told CNN that several factors, including the former president’s long history of living and working in New York and his efforts to win over minority voters, played into the decision to hold the Bronx rally. The official said that the area’s proximity to Trump’s criminal trial was also a consideration, as was the former president’s desire to “challenge the status quo” in a state that has long voted for Democrats.

Trump has insisted that he has a shot this fall at winning New York, which a Republican presidential nominee has not carried since 1984. The Bronx is a Democratic stronghold, which Trump lost by about 68 points to Joe Biden in 2020. That margin, however, was down from four years earlier, when Hillary Clinton carried the county by 79 points. Residents in the South Bronx, where Trump’s rally is taking place, are mainly Hispanic (64%) and Black (31%), according to the US Census Bureau.

The Biden campaign launched two new ads Thursday aimed at highlighting what it called “Trump’s long record of failures and broken promises” to Black Americans. The spots point out that Trump was sued for housing discrimination in the 1970s and charged with discriminating against African Americans; promoted the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the US; pushed for the death penalty for five minority teenagers who were wrongly accused and convicted of beating and raping a woman in Central Park in the 1980s; and “stood with violent White supremacists” in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ritchie Torres, who represent parts of the Bronx, blasted the former president’s upcoming event.

Ocasio-Cortez, in an interview with NY1, called it an “attempt to, I think, trick some of our folks here,” while Torres told The New York Times that Trump was “radioactive” in the Bronx.

Trump’s outreach to minority voters also comes as the former president has made stoking fears about undocumented migrants a cornerstone of his campaign. He has regularly made false or misleading claims about illegal immigration and used dehumanizing language when referring to migrants.