After a years-long breakup with his hometown, former President Donald Trump is back in New York, this time as a criminal defendant
He’s visiting Manhattan construction sites, decrying local crime and holding court in his gilded Fifth Avenue penthouse.
After a years-long breakup with his hometown, Donald Trump is back in New York, this time as a criminal defendant. Stuck here most weekdays for the duration of his criminal hush money trial, the Queens-born presumptive GOP nominee has been conjuring images of his old days as a celebrity developer, reality TV star and tabloid fixture with weekly local campaign stops as he settles back into the place that made him, voted against him twice — and may end up convicting him.
After leaving court Thursday, Trump made another stop, heading to a midtown Manhattan firehouse with boxes of pizza in hand. Trump spent about 10 minutes shaking hands, posing for photos and chatting with several dozen firefighters and other personnel there before returning to Trump Tower for the night.
The felony trial has curtailed Trump’s ability to campaign across the country. But it also means Trump is often spending four days a week in the nation’s media capital, with access to ready-made locations for campaign events that he can use to court voters as he tries to reclaim the White House.
“While President Trump is forced to spend the next few weeks here in Manhattan, he should use that opportunity to get to communities around the city,” said former U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Republican who challenged Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022 and lost a closer than expected race.
Zeldin declined to detail private conversations with Trump campaign aides, but noted his gubernatorial campaign had included stops in heavily Asian American neighborhoods like Chinatown and Flushing in Queens, Dominican communities in the south Bronx, and Orthodox Jewish communities, among others.
While many were longtime Democratic neighborhoods, he said, “they were excited that I showed up and I was talking to them about issues that they cared about more than blind partisan loyalty.”
He noted news coverage of Trump’s stops carries them far beyond local businesses or community groups.
“That video that gets taken ends up getting shared widely all over the country,” he said.
Trump’s stops in heavily Democratic New York City have felt sometimes more like a bid for mayor than a run to reclaim the White House.
