Despite the fact that New York gave rise to Donald Trump, the city has largely rejected him these past ten years as a boor, a fraud, and a C-list celebrity — a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the famous words of Spy Magazine, that timeless avatar of Manhattan’s cheeky superiority. The 2024 election changed all that: It turns out that there are now a lot of New Yorkers who like Trump, and they live in places typically beyond the gaze of the nation’s cultural capital. As New York‘s Simon van Zuylen-Wood writes in this report on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 14th District, which straddles Queens and the Bronx and made a remarkable swing toward Trump this cycle, the city’s rightward lurch is emblematic of how the country as a whole came to embrace him. In documenting that shift, Simon has put together a definitive, damning indictment of the Democratic Party, which, like many of us in the media, has been blind to the reasons people might feel compelled to throw in their lot with someone so obviously odious.
—Ryu Spaeth, features editor, New York |
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