After weeks of being the headline-grabbing defendant in a criminal trial in Manhattan, Donald J. Trump will head to Crotona Park in the Bronx for a rally on Thursday where he no doubt hopes to take a more favorable star turn.
Predictably, many people in the Bronx are not happy about that.
“I wish he would just disappear,” said Noel Rivera, a retired subway track worker who was walking his dog in Crotona Park on Wednesday. “Nobody that I know supports him.”
Mr. Trump’s event on Thursday evening in the expansive park in the South Bronx is his first campaign rally in New York State since 2016.
His choice of the Bronx might seem odd, since it is one of the most deeply Democratic counties in the country.In 2020, President Biden won the Bronx by 68 percent. In 2016, Mr. Trump lost the Bronx by more than 300,000 votes.
Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said the rally is part of an effort by Mr. Trump to “make sure that constituents that are not traditionally Republican to get spoken to, are seen and are heard.”
Mr. Trump, a longtime New Yorker who now lives in Florida, has spent much of his recent weeks in Manhattan at his criminal trial on charges that he falsified business records to cover up a payment to a porn star, who said she had a sexual encounter with him in 2006. The defense rested without Mr. Trump taking the stand; closing arguments are scheduled for Tuesday.
At the rally, Mr. Trump is expected to talk about inflation and violent crime, said a campaign spokeswoman. The rally has a permit for 3,500 people, according to the Police Department.
“We’re making inroads across the city,” said Representative Nicole Malliotakis, the lone Republican member of New York City’s House delegation. “But you have to show up, and you have to talk to people about the issues that they care about. Right now those issues are the economy and public safety.”
The Bronx is 57 percent Hispanic, 28 percent Black and 8 percent white, according to census date. Recent polls show Mr. Trump gaining ground among some Black and Latino voters. Last year, a Republican councilwoman was elected to represent the Bronx for the first time in more than 40 years. Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in 2022, came within six points of Gov. Kathy Hochul. But Ms. Hochul beat Mr. Zeldin by 55 percentage points in the Bronx.
Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat, said Mr. Trump owes the borough an apology because of his “catastrophic management” of the pandemic, which cost thousands of people in the borough their lives.
“He is so unpopular in the Bronx that he’s radioactive,” Mr. Torres said. “His approval ratings are lower than that of lead and arsenic.”
A protest elsewhere in the park is planned during Mr. Trump’s rally by Amanda Septimo, an assemblywoman from the Bronx, and Kirsten John Foy, president of the activism group Arc of Justice.
Mr. Foy said the rally, with prominent city unions, is designed to counter the narrative that Mr. Trump will do significantly better in places like the Bronx.
“He’s trying to distract and to deflect from the fact that he’s under criminal indictment,” Mr. Foy said. “The best way to get off the front page for being a criminal and get on the front page for being a candidate is to hold a rally in the media capital of the world.”
Most people in Crotona Park on Wednesday morning seemed unhappy that Mr. Trump was coming. Maggie Rodriguez, 57, an electrician who was walking her Chihuahua in the park, cringed at the site of the Trump team setting up for the rally.
“We won’t have a democracy anymore,” if Mr. Trump is re-elected, she said. “God bless America.”
But the feeling was not unanimous. Erica Perez, 37, a store clerk, said she liked that Mr. Trump had referenced the Bible.
“I’m happy he’s coming,” she said. “When Trump was president, America was better.”
Arsenio Colon, 79, a retired maintenance worker, said he used to vote Democrat but now supports Mr. Trump and the Republican Party because he likes its tough stance on foreign policy with China.
“Anytime the Democratic Party is on top, this country has more problems,” said Mr. Colon, who lives near the park. “This country needs a strong president all the time.”
As workers set up a stage for Mr. Trump on Wednesday, a campaign representative asked a New York Times reporter to leave and threatened to call the police, asserting that the permit allowed the campaign to eject uninvited guests from the public park.
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokeswoman, said park security and law enforcement “are notified to assist” when an “individual refuses to leave the permitted area.”
Mr. Rivera, who has lived in the Bronx since 1958, said he would need no encouragement to leave the area once the rally begins.
“He’ll be lucky if he gets 35 people from around here to support him,” he said.
Michael Gold and Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.