Why the Big City President Made Cities the Enemy

Donald Trump — a lifelong New Yorker — declares war on urban America.

Several days ago in Central Florida, three close friends set out for a nighttime fishing expedition on a lake in the small town of Frostproof and wound up beaten and shot to death on a dirt road. In a news conference, the local sheriff, Grady Judd, described the aftermath as one of the worst crime scenes he had ever encountered — a massacre.

Three suspects were quickly apprehended in trailers in the woods. Sheriff Judd identified the accused ringleader, a 26-year-old white man from the area named Tony “T.J.” Wiggins, as someone with 230 felony arrests on his record, 15 convictions and two stints in state prison — “evil in the flesh.’'

President Donald Trump has not called out Frostproof or the surrounding area of Polk County — where he beat Hillary Clinton by a margin of 55 percent — as a hellhole lost to lawlessness and carnage. That is the language he reserves for America’s urban quarters — even as he has continued to profit from the cities he has lived in so imperially.

His re-election effort now has him both expanding the rhetorical war against cities and realizing it. Indeed, some crime has risen since the beginning of the pandemic. Gun violence has spiked in New York. Fourteen people were shot this week in a drive-by shooting in Chicago. Asked during a Fox News interview with Chris Wallace last weekend what might account for these unsettling changes, the president did not consider the toll of Covid-19, or that the police might be staging a slowdown in response to criticisms over the handling of protests in the name of ending sanctioned brutalities.

“I explain it very simply,’’ he answered instead, “by saying they’re Democrat-run cities. They are liberally run. They are stupidly run.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/nyregion/trump-cities.html