A couple of months ago, I took the subway to a rally for Donald Trump and thought about the meaning of “Trump country.” To most New Yorkers, the term conveys a distant place, a distant mind-set—a pale, aging mass of strangers far outside “the city.” Not somewhere you can get to on the 5 train.
The rally, in the South Bronx, was choreographed to dispel this notion. Thousands of people—men and women, young and old, Black and brown and white—sweated through their Trump gear as they filed past a police barricade into Crotona Park, in a precinct that went for Joe Biden by a margin of seventy-seven points in 2020. The Bronx is about a third Black and two-thirds Hispanic, not exactly the typical MAGA demographic. I sensed a frothiness in the crowd: the joy of finding G.O.P. kindreds in an urban sea of blue.
Polls showed that young men of color were swerving toward Trump. I’d come to the rally in part to understand why. From previous conversations with his supporters, who frequently referenced “peace through strength”—a description of his approach to foreign policy and, arguably, human relations in general—I’d gathered that the pivot was inspired by his strongman persona, the twinning of individual masculinity and American might. The former President offered safety, closed borders, prosperity, and patriotic inclusion—in contrast to what he framed as Biden’s crime-ridden streets, migrant influx, inflation, and exclusionary identity politics. Voters who, by dint of geography and race, were assumed to be shoo-in Democrats were having second thoughts.
One of the warmup speakers, Madeline Brame, a Black woman from Harlem, talked about losing one son to homicide, in 2018, and another to fentanyl-laced cocaine, in 2020. She blamed liberal policies and the inaction of Alvin Bragg, the Democratic District Attorney, who, last year, charged Trump with thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records. “Get rid of A.O.C. Vote her ass out! Get rid of Ritchie Torres. Vote his ass out!” she said, referring to the local congressional representatives. She explained how hard it was to make rent and keep her fridge full. It was time, she said, for Black people and poor people to try a new party. “We don’t want the Republicans to take our votes for granted like the Democrats did for fifty years.”
Another speaker, Byron Donalds, the Black congressman representing southwest Florida and a Trump surrogate, echoed Brame: “In our politics, they tell us that Black votes are Democrat votes.” The crowd booed. “I’m from Brooklyn, New York,” he said, “and I know the conservative streak that is in the heart of New Yorkers.”
Standing next to me was Antonio Peña, a thirtysomething man of Puerto Rican and Dominican heritage who has lived his whole life in the Bronx. He wore an American flag over his shoulders, tied like a cape at his neck, and raised his tattooed arms to clap. It was his first political rally. “Trump’s coming here to talk to us,” he told me. “We’re not dumb. We have such educated people that live in this borough, and we’re being told that we can’t do better. The Dems are saying that.” He felt that Trump had a fairer, more optimistic vision. Trump country was here.
In early June, a couple of weeks after the rally, I visited Peña at home, in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. We sat on a bench outside his apartment building, a new mixed-income development overlooking the Harlem River, which separated us from Manhattan. He was in between appointments for his job as a counsellor to youth who are under court supervision. “I was first working at a juvenile detention center,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the right program for these kids. Now I’m on this program for youth who, if they have cases, can serve in the community.”
His neighborhood bore classic signs of gentrification: a combination wine bar and bookstore run by a “venture activist,” a vegan café that’s also a plant shop. Peña showed me the first local building that was remodelled into upscale rentals. He wasn’t worried about longtime residents being displaced. It was up to them, he said, to “make more money, work hard, get a job.” (He had obtained his apartment through an affordable-housing lottery held by the city.)
Peña grew up in the neighborhood, near St. Mary’s Park. His mother, a school administrator turned kindergarten teacher’s aide, tended to vote Democratic, like most Nuyoricans. She raised her son to speak English and Spanish, and enrolled him in Catholic school. Shootings weren’t uncommon in the area. “You got two passports in the hood,” Peña told me. “You got military and sports.” After high school, he trained as a boxer and took some college classes, then enlisted in the Navy. At his first duty station, in San Diego, “I wasn’t thinking about politics,” he told me. “I was thinking about the mission at hand. I was thinking about life, about where I fit in.”
He served the minimum four years, then went to film school in Los Angeles. He had always loved the movies (“Boyz n the Hood,” “The Matrix”) and fantasized about writing scripts. It was 2016, and the prevailing sentiment on campus was intense skepticism, if not outright hatred, of Trump. His film-theory instructor “would talk about Trump all the time,” assuming a consensus view. This activated a critical, contrarian instinct in Peña and got him interested in politics for the first time. He started to read up on Trump and Hillary Clinton and felt pulled in by the Republicans’ platform—and their sensibility. “These were people I can speak with and not be judged for my opinion,” he said. At some point, he thought, O.K., I’m gonna vote for Trump. It was the first time he’d voted at all in a federal election.
After graduation, he realized that the uncertain hustle of the film industry was not for him, and decided to move back to New York. “I never want a gap in money,” he said. “I’ve been a poor man.” He learned of an opportunity to work at a juvenile detention center near his childhood home and successfully applied for the position. By then, he identified as a Republican and had adopted a questioning stance toward the party that had always ruled the Bronx. It seemed odd to him that the Democrats won by default. What were Torres and A.O.C. all about? Was his city councilperson, Diana Ayala, following through with her promise to expand Mill Pond Park? What had Vanessa Gibson, the borough president, done for the South Bronx? Why didn’t the residents of Mott Haven get more of a say in the construction of a local jail meant to replace Rikers Island?
Peña learned that the Bronx had the lowest voter turnout in the city. Democratic politicians often won their primary races by a few thousand votes, and tended to lean on welfarism, which he found contrary to the spirit of his community. “We are here to work,” he explained. Through the pandemic lockdown and the racial-justice protests of 2020, he considered the alternatives presented by the Republicans. He sensed that others in the Bronx were doing so, too, after Black Lives Matter activists “destroyed their own neighborhoods,” he said, referring to instances of vandalism. He never liked the movement to defund the police; his cousin was a cop, and although Peña had been stopped and frisked as a teen-ager, he didn’t resent law enforcement. He voted for Trump again in 2020.
“We got a lot of Hispanics. We love our Hispanics,” Trump said in 2019, at a rally outside Albuquerque. “The Black people are so much on my side now,” he said earlier this year, while fighting multiple prosecutions, “because they see what’s happening to me happens to them.” In 2020, the Trump campaign had built a number of coalitions intended to recruit nonwhite voters, and the Republican National Committee opened a handful of outreach offices that targeted communities of color. Trump proved to be surprisingly popular with Hispanic men, earning forty per cent of their votes; he fared poorly with Black voters. This year, a spokesperson for his campaign told me, the strategy is simple: “He shows up, listens, and makes it clear that we’ll be better off with him as President, just like we were four years ago.”
Trump has wagered that nonwhite voters, even those in Democratic districts, will come to see how closely their values align with those propounded by the G.O.P.: traditional family roles, religion, fiscal discipline, meritocracy. A man I met at the rally in the Bronx, a Chinese-born scientist, told me that he went from being an Obama fan to a casual Republican to a Trump activist over the issue of affirmative action. Around 2016, when Trump was running for President, Asian college applicants were suing Harvard, claiming that the university’s affirmative-action policy discriminated against them. The scientist, whom I’ll call Mr. Zhou, went to Boston to support the plaintiffs and to organize with other Asian Americans. (He asked that I not use his real name, for fear of retaliation at work.) A lawyer who was friendly with Trump came to one of their subsequent meetings in D.C. and offered his expertise. Zhou wrote an editorial for a Chinese-language outlet, arguing that a vote for Trump was a vote for a conservative Supreme Court that would strike down affirmative action. His fellow-organizers, who had previously voted Democratic, were persuaded. “Most of those people became Trump supporters because of this issue,” he told me.
More recently, Zhou has been concerned with “illegal immigration,” which is frequently discussed on the WeChat and Telegram groups he uses to keep up with English- and Chinese-language news. Not long after the rally, we met at a café in Rego Park, Queens, and he showed me the planned site of a migrant shelter nearby, where he’d attended a protest. He subscribed to a police-blotter app to follow reports of thefts and other property crimes, which he related to the presence of “illegals.” He no longer rode the subway. (Crime rates have fallen since the start of the pandemic, but not in his information universe.) The Democrats misunderstand what minorities want, he said. “I support common sense. If Trump becomes President, these things will be taken care of—crime, education, and global issues like war.”
In deep-blue New York City, where more than two hundred thousand migrants have arrived in the past two years, immigration policy has drawn many people to Trump and the Republican platform. A man named Mr. Alvarez, who attended the Bronx rally with his wife and daughter, all of them in matching red shirts, told me that “border crime” had spread across the city. (He asked that I not use his first name, because of what he sees as discrimination against Trump supporters.) When we later met for lunch, in Flushing, Trump was in the news for citing the murder of a Michigan woman as evidence of the violence committed by “illegal immigrants.” Migrants “are crossing illegally,” Alvarez told me. “Since they broke the law, they have to be deported.” When I brought up the studies showing that immigrants commit fewer crimes than people born in the U.S., he texted me links to articles disputing those studies.
