Where the 2024 election is concerned, it seems that every day we move further into the realm of the surreal.
Despite the lawfare being waged against him, former President Trump has made some audacious moves. He’s been making moves on blue territory, which has set the Biden campaign back on its heels – and he’s attacking on multiple fronts, most recently, in New York, where he is now planning a rally in the Bronx.
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In a major throwdown to Democrats, former President Trump will host a campaign rally in the Bronx on Thursday as he sets his sights on flipping the Empire State red this November, a situation that would have been unfathomable in 2021 when he departed the White House.
Trump’s campaign announced Friday night that Thursday’s rally will take place at 6 p.m. in Crotona Park, a 127-acre public park just blocks away from the boundary line of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district. The New York Post reports that the campaign has a permit to fit 3,500 people into the space.
The move comes on the heels of a record-breaking Trump rally that brought up to 100,000 supporters together in the Democratic stronghold of New Jersey last week.
In any conflict, from war to political campaigns, one should never let one’s opponent define the terms of the battle. The Biden campaign is doing precisely this. While they make moves to shore up their base, from an unconscionable Title IX rule change to appeasing Hamas-supporting rioters, Trump is taking the fight directly into Biden’s territory. Last week it was New Jersey.
See Related: Trump Tells 100K Supporters on Wildwood Beach: ‘We Will Win New Jersey’
Despite everything the Biden campaign and their supporters – including several big-city DAs and prosecutors I could name – Trump is pulling farther ahead in the RealClearPolitics battleground state averages – and he’s seeking to expand the map while the Biden people appear to be trying to hold on to what they have, and nothing more.
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See Related: Trump Making a Play for Minnesota While Biden Stumbles and Fumbles
With all that said: It’s pretty evident that Trump has very little chance of flipping New York to vote red. The last time the Empire State voted for a Republican President was in 1984, in Ronald Reagan’s historic 49-state landslide. But every move Trump makes in blue territory forces the Biden people to react, to expend resources, to get their allies to respond, to craft statements, to take time to give interviews. The Congressman in whose district Trump’s Bronx rally will be held took the time to make a rather histrionic reply:
Rep. Ritchie John Torres, a Democrat who represents New York’s 15th Congressional District, where the rally is being held, blasted the former president in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“The South Bronx has no greater enemy than Donald Trump, who is on a mission to dismantle the social safety net on which Bronx families depend for their survival,” Torres said. “Trump is and has always been a fraud. The South Bronx – the most Democratic area in the nation – will not buy the snake oil that he is selling.
Note that wording: He is talking about the “social safety net” – welfare – while Trump talks about jobs.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to deteriorate.
See Related: Biden Descends Into Confusion, Denial of Reality and the Polls in Atlanta
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The Bronx rally is scheduled for Thursday, and it will be interesting indeed to see the crowd; few people, including myself, expected Trump to draw 80-100,000 people in deep-blue New Jersey – but he did. If he draws a big crowd deep in the Bronx, then the Biden campaign should be sweating bullets.
I think Donald Trump has been channeling his inner Georges Jacques Danton, a prominent figure of the French Revolution, who was famed for saying “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace” – audacity, more audacity, and ever more audacity. Donald Trump is many things, but lately, his audacity has come to the fore.
