Trump's Urban Policies and the Disgruntled Urban Voter

Trump’s Urban Policies and the Disgruntled Urban Voter

A few weeks ago, Frank Bruni of The New York Times wrote an opinion piece in his newsletter titled “What if Trump Doesn’t Need to Keep Any of His Promises?”^[i] Bruni argued that President-elect Trump is uniquely positioned to avoid accountability for performance once his second administration takes office.

“That’s a function of both the age and the man.” Bruni wrote. “No president in my lifetime has been elected in such a corrupted information environment, and no president has so shamelessly participated in its corruption. If Trump fails by established metrics, he’ll declare those metrics bogus and delegitimize the experts and agencies that calculate them.”

Bruni ends his essay with warnings to the mainstream media about how vulnerable they are to organized efforts to intimidate them. He warns that the general public, and perhaps even courtroom juries, may value illusions of performance over facts and the principle of press freedom.

I agree with Bruni’s warnings. They are serious and credible. Trump’s campaign rhetoric was a chaotic stew of histrionic goals in both domestic and foreign policies. Few specifics about how he would or could achieve his goals were given. This is not unusual for Presidential candidates, to be sure.

Yet the extreme scale and scope of Trump’s braggadocious proclamations make him potentially much more vulnerable to criticism from those who keep score than previous presidents have been. Indeed, he magnifies his vulnerability by insisting that even his most ambitious goals will be easily achieved because, he argues, the most important element needed for success is him. Once he, and only he, regains the levers of power, he assures voters again and again that he will use his personal power to achieve audacious goals seemingly without breaking a sweat.

The President-elect has assured people he will lower the price of eggs, tackle general inflation, create millions of new jobs for American citizens, reverse the growth of “woke” culture, close the borders, end illegal immigration, deport millions of undocumented people, defuse nuclear North Korea, prevent a nuclear Iran, deter aggression from China and Russia, and bring peace to Ukraine and the Middle East.

His “day one” goals will transform America’s qualify of life and restore its standing in the world, both of which, Trump continues to claim, were in excellent condition until the 2020 election was stolen from him by an illegal cabal led by the “Biden crime family” and the corrupt Democratic Party.

Part of Bruni’s warning is based on the extreme loyalty (indeed fealty) to Donald Trump that his most ardent supporters have asserted since he entered American politics in 2016. Analysts argue about the size of this faction, but polls indicate that somewhere between 42-46 percent of voters support the President-elect regardless of any evidence that could shake their resolve. Being a Trump loyalist has become ingrained in their own personae.

The size of this faction is an enormous asset. But it wasn’t large enough to win the 2024 Presidential election. Trump won the election with a little less than 50 percent of the vote. That means that he won just enough marginal support from other factions of voters to push his totals to victory. My own analysis (discussed in The Urban Lens of December 3, 2024) focused on one important faction: the disgruntled urban voter.

Trump’s return to the White House will be a short-lived blip in American history unless he can create the illusion of great successes before the mid-term Congressional elections gear up in less than 18 months. House Republicans must dominate those elections to give the party a secure hold on Congress and thereby control the national agenda during the crucial second half of Trump’s upcoming term. That control could allow the party to unite behind a candidate who would inherit Trump’s coalition for the 2028 Presidential campaign.

It could be JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Kristi Noem, or someone who isn’t even on the radar today. But whoever it is will need to inherit a unified Republican Party that has a strong Congressional majority and at least the illusion of great successes that are valued by the relatively small number of 2024 voters who joined the 2024 MAGA coalition to produce Trump’s victory.

This brings us back to those disgruntled urban voters. Cities and urban counties with huge Democratic Party majorities also have substantial numbers of voters who do not identify with the local ruling coalitions. They seem invisible in local elections, where turnout is usually very low. Yet they were very visible in most statewide vote counts during the 2024 Presidential election. Their unexpected votes for Trump were key to the mega-trend that produced a marked shift toward MAGA candidates in almost every county across the U.S. (detailed city data are not yet widely available).

Disgruntled urban voters played crucial roles in the statewide voting totals that gave victory to Trump in all seven swing states, and thus victory in the Electoral College. They helped produce the narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives and they were essential to giving Republicans control of the U.S. Senate.

Disgruntled urban voters unexpectedly jumped on the MAGA bandwagon. But they are not yet ardent Trump supporters. They must perceive clear Trump policy wins in their own backyards if their votes are to be retained for the 2026 midterm House & Senate elections. They are the “show me” faction of the Trump coalition.

We lack good polling data on exactly what these disgruntled urban voters want. But Trump’s campaign rhetoric was crafted to appeal to what he thinks they want. His instincts tend to be good.

Trump’s campaign rhetoric about cities set the stage for a major wave of Federal government interventions in cities by describing cities as “cesspools,” “Hellholes,” “dangerous,” and “disgusting.” He repeatedly claimed, without any evidence, that cities across the nation have been overrun with undocumented immigrants who are violent criminals, gang members, and former patients from foreign mental hospitals.

He also continually tried to undermine the legitimacy of city governments in Democratic-controlled cities. With help from radical Biden Administration allies, Trump proclaimed that cities had defunded local police forces and had become so focused on “woke” and “communist” ideologies of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), transgender identities, and critical race theory (CRT) that they no longer had political and/or moral legitimacy to govern.

Big city governments, according to Trump’s rhetoric, are controlled today by un-American coalitions of fraudulently elected Democratic mayors, prosecutors, city council members, and school board directors. These elected officials work hand-in-hand with equally un-American elites who control public employee unions, radical left-wing philanthropies, universities, and non-profit social service and hospital corporations. These coalitions in New York, Washington, Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Portland, Seattle, and all other major cities not controlled by Republican mayors should be rejected as illegitimate.

Consequently, we can expect to see an immediate burst of “shock and awe” policies from the second Trump Administration to create the perception that Trump is devoted to making rapid change inside American cities. Examples are likely to include:

· In addition to “closing the border,” there likely will be forceful raids to round-up undocumented residents far from the borders. Raids likely will focus on cities first before similar raids target rural areas, where the agricultural workforce contains many undocumented people. Raids will be conducted by Federal immigration officers, national guard units, and perhaps regular duty military units. Cities with sanctuary laws will receive special attention. Federal public affairs officials will saturate local media (traditional and social media) with dramatic videos and extensive details about each raid.

· Once the public is accustomed to new Federal immigration raids within cities, there may be an unprecedented wave of Federal anti-gang and drug trafficking raids, based on the assertion that local police forces are no longer credible enforcement agencies. Every raid will come with an aggressive public affairs blitz by Federal agencies.

· Family separation policies will likely be reinstated at the Mexican border, but these policies will likely be implemented among detained residents as well. Incoming Trump officials have already indicated that resident families will be able to avoid separation by submitting their entire families to deportation even if only one member is undocumented.

· The U.S. Department of Justice will end its efforts to investigate alleged systematic civil rights abuses by city police forces. Current consent decrees with cities will also be abandoned.

· Billions of Federal Department of Education grant dollars that currently provide services to under-funded urban school districts likely will be cut from the budget. In addition, new Federal policies will prohibit funds from flowing to urban public schools unless schools end all DEI initiatives and unless they reform curricula to remove all content that is determined to be “woke” and/or related to critical race theory. Many Republican controlled state governments have already enacted these policies. The Trump Administration will likely extend these state-level initiatives nationwide for all Federal programs.

· Federal urban programs that provide grants and low-interest loans for housing, commercial space, historic preservation, economic development, and community revitalization will likely be consolidated into large packages to encourage large urban developers to announced big, flashy redevelopment projects in major Downtown centers. The complex processes by which Federal grants and loans are reviewed by Federal bureaucrats and outside experts will likely be abandoned. Decision-making will likely be driven by top-down directives from political appointees and senior White House officials. Trump himself may choose which large-scale developments, and which developers, will be subsidized to rebuild strategic urban centers.

Although many of these policies will be challenged in Federal and local courts, it is likely that relatively few injunctions will be awarded, especially by Federal courts. The U.S. Supreme Court greatly expanded the scope of direct Presidential authority in Trump v. United States. Whoever serves as the next Attorney General will argue forcefully that lower courts should defer to the new President’s sense of urgency to implement the Presidency’s new authorities.

The Supreme Court will need to clarify ambiguous components of Trump v. United States, but until that happens, many Federal judges won’t want to stand in the way. And even if some Federal judges do invoke injunctions to stop the “shock and awe” components of Trump’s new policies, the new Administration’s aggressive public affairs offices, in concert with the highly polished MAGA social media infrastructure, will use each injunction to visibility blame the courts, not the President, when dramatic changes do not appear as promised.

The incoming Trump Administration has a narrow timespan over the next 18 months to convince a strategically essential faction of disgruntled urban voters that it can use the authority of the Federal government – the Presidency, Congress, and Federal Courts – to overturn the entrenched power of Democratic urban coalitions in their own home cities. If this faction of urban voters can be brought into the MAGA coalition on a national basis, there is an excellent opportunity for the MAGA political movement to retain full control of the Republican Party and to extend its dominance over national politics well after the end of the second Trump Administration on January 20, 2029.

Bob Gleeson

---

^[i] Frank Bruni, NYT Newsletter, December 19, 2024.