From a Long Island Rally, Trump Lobs Exaggerated Attacks at New York City

From a Long Island Rally, Trump Lobs Exaggerated Attacks at New York City

Donald Trump told a raucous crowd that he would soon visit Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colo., two cities that are focal points of his exaggerated claims about migrants in America.

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By Michael Gold

Reporting from Uniondale, N.Y.

On the day that he was originally set to return to his hometown and receive the sentence for his 34 felony convictions, former President Donald J. Trump found himself a few miles east, basking in the raucous adulation of a packed arena on Long Island.

Standing in front of thousands at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., Mr. Trump received a local hero’s reception, as he drew an exaggerated depiction of a New York in decline, made false claims and hammered Democrats over crime, inflation and immigration.

He continued to falsely maintain that Springfield, Ohio, had been over overrun by illegal immigrants, even though the Haitian community he was referring to has temporary legal status. Then, he announced he would visit both that city and Aurora, Colo., another focal point of his exaggerated claims about migrants.

“I’m going to go there in the next two weeks. I’m going to Springfield, and I’m going to Aurora,” Mr. Trump said. “You may never see me again, but that’s OK. Got to do what I got to do.”

As he discussed Springfield, members of the crowd began chanting, “Save the cats,” a reference to a debunked claim spread by Mr. Trump that Haitian migrants were abducting and eating pets. (Springfield’s Republican mayor said this week that a visit from Mr. Trump would burden the city’s strained resources.)

Mr. Trump’s rally on Long Island was his second campaign event since the apparent assassination attempt against him on Sunday in West Palm Beach, Fla. Though he spoke with typical vigor about the incident, he later appeared jumpy at one point, as someone apparently approached the stage.

“I thought this was a wiseguy coming up,” Mr. Trump said, suddenly breaking midthought from his comments on taxes. Acknowledging his nerves, he later added, “You know, I’ve got a little bit of a yip problem here, right? That was amazing. I was ready to start duking it out.”

Mr. Trump’s decision to hold a rally in New York with just under seven weeks left in the race provoked raised eyebrows from political observers. New York, a Democratic stronghold, is not one of the battleground states seen as critical to his path to victory, and his campaign has not been expending resources here.

But Long Island is critical to Republicans’ hopes of holding the House. And the region is a kind of proving ground for Mr. Trump’s attacks on Democrats over policies that he insists have fueled crime and inflation.

At his rallies nationwide Mr. Trump often uses an apocalyptic picture of New York as an abstract emblem of a liberal agenda that he says has caused lawlessness and decay. Even so, his comments resonated with thousands of energized supporters for whom the city is their backyard.

Still, Mr. Trump, who faces tight polls with Vice President Kamala Harris in several critical battleground states, insisted that his rally was meant to help him win the state. He marveled at his charged audience, at one point comparing himself to Elvis Presley (“maybe greater even than Elvis, because Elvis had a guitar”), who played the arena several times.

Mr. Trump appealed directly to his New York supporters, promising to renovate the city’s subway, to turn ground zero into a federally managed national monument and to restore a state and local tax break that he did not acknowledge he had limited during his presidency.

Mr. Trump also repeated his debunked claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. As he railed against a “radical Democrat regime,” he insisted that he was not “driven by partisan ideology.” And as he tried to make the case that he could flip New York, he continued to stoke fear around immigration.

“We’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Democrats’ immigration policies. “And we’re not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot.”

Mr. Trump at one point misleadingly claimed that he had secured the endorsement of “rank-and-file” members of the Teamsters union, a reference to its releasing internal polling that showed a majority of members favored him over Ms. Harris.

But the union announced on Wednesday that it would not endorse either candidate, and the local Long Island Teamsters endorsed Ms. Harris; it was among a number of other locals across the country, including in battleground states, to do so.

Mr. Trump also responded to federal law enforcement agencies saying that Iranian hackers trying to influence the 2024 election had sent excerpts from stolen Trump campaign documents to people associated with the Biden campaign.

The law enforcement agencies said that the recipients did not respond. But Mr. Trump — who during his 2016 campaign seized on emails obtained by Russian hackers and published by WikiLeaks — complained about “foreign election interference” and claimed that “Biden is working with Iran.”