Trump continues fundraising campaign tour on the west coast
WASHINGTON – One of the most arresting images of Donald Trump’s inaugural address in 2017 was a grim portrait of urban America, riddled by poverty, gangs, drugs and other blight.
“Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” he said. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
Well over halfway through his presidency, Trump continues to portray urban America in terms of “carnage.” Baltimore, Chicago and Atlanta have each taken turns being portrayed as bastions of crime and dysfunction. His latest is Los Angeles, where he is visiting for campaign fundraisers, just a week after his administration dispatched a busload of officials to scrutinize homelessness in the city.
“We can’t let Los Angeles, San Francisco and numerous other cities destroy themselves by allowing what’s happening,” Trump said to reporters Tuesday, referring to the number of homeless people in those cities and suggesting they were disturbing more affluent residents.
“We have people living in our ... best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings and pay tremendous taxes, where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige,” he told reporters on Air Force One as he flew to California.
“In many cases they came from other countries, and they moved to Los Angeles or they moved to San Francisco because of the prestige of the city, and all of a sudden they have tents. Hundreds and hundreds of tents and people living at the entrance to their office building. And they want to leave.”
Trump’s rhetoric sharply contrasts with the reality of most cities, where, despite the visibility of the homeless, crime rates for the last decade have hit historic lows and an influx of new residents have revitalized many neighborhoods. His repeated denigration of cities has offended many urban voters.
None of that, however, carries much direct political risk for the president in his 2020 reelection campaign: He doesn’t need urban voters. He lost the urban vote by almost 2-to-1 in 2016 and still won the election.
Anti-urban hostility may help mobilize the rural voters who were the backbone of his 2016 presidential election and whom his campaign needs to turn out at high levels if he is to secure his reelection.
“Trump feeds off the raw emotions of his followers,” said Charles S. Bullock III, a political scientist at the University of Georgia who has studied the presidency.
“He paints a picture of an urban landscape that his people would not want to live in.”
The urban-rural split will be a particularly important fault line in 2020 in three of the states that are crucial to Trump’s political prospects: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – swing states where surging turnout in rural areas helped him overcome big losses in Democratic-dominated cities in 2016.
One risk of Trump’s city-bashing could be to alienate voters in suburban counties, which are shaping up to be a key battleground for the 2020 election.
“The population that is a hazard for him in this area are people who are highly educated and conservative leaning, who think of themselves as Republican but are not so enamored of his leadership style,” said Katherine Cramer, author of a book about Wisconsin’s former GOP governor.