No, Trump is not going to win a majority of the voters in North Philly or the Bronx, but that’s not really the point. The point is that he is showing up and offering a real alternative.
Former President Donald Trump is set to speak in North Philadelphia on Saturday, the next stop in what has been an unconventional but highly effective strategy of his 2024 presidential campaign.
It all started, as so many things in life do, with a trip to a bodega in New York City, and now it is a staple of the former president’s third run at the White House.
Back in April, at the beginning of a criminal trial that would limit his campaigning for weeks, Donald Trump showed up after court at a small locally owned store in Harlem for an impromptu and mostly organic little rally.
Within minutes, social media blew up with images of a diverse crowd chanting Trump’s name, with a kind of celebrity appeal we have not seen from a politician since at least Barack Obama.
Next, Trump took his show to the Wildwood boardwalks of deep blue New Jersey, then to a rally in the Bronx, next to an event in a black church in Detroit, and on Saturday Trump will deliver remarks in North Philadelphia.
For those who don’t know much about North Philly, it’s one of the roughest neighborhoods in one of the roughest cities in America. The mostly Black and Hispanic residents have suffered generations of crime, drugs, and poverty under Democrats’ leadership.
But it is also the kind of place where Republicans often fear to tread, or maybe just haven’t bothered to, because they don’t actually think they can win there.
