President Donald Trump appears to have it out for American cities.
In every one of his presidential runs, he described life in them as if it were something out of an 1980s horror movie: “The cities are rotting and they are indeed cesspools of blood,” he said in 2022, while announcing his most recent campaign. (Though he added, “We are going to go and help them, even if they don’t want the help.” How magnanimous!)
This wasn’t just loose campaign talk. Recently, while making misleading claims about rampant crime in Washington, D.C. (despite what he said, it’s actually down), Trump suggested he could use the authority of the presidency to perform a federal “takeover” of major cities like the nation’s capital and New York City. (He may be from there, but he is not a fan.) And most recently, he threatened Chicago.
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Other American cities, which tend to lean left and are often home to large immigrant populations, have gotten failing grades from the president, too: Chicago is “worse than Afghanistan.” Atlanta is a veritable “killing field.” A number of California cities are “war zones and ganglands.” D.C. itself he’s previously called a “rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole.” (Dramatic, but to be honest, he sounds kind of similar to Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, who once called cities “pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.”)
