Fifty summers have somehow scooted by since Peter Benchley published Jaws, sending shivers of terrified delight through the summer readers of 1974, sunning themselves on the Long Island beaches whose waters the fictive shark roamed for prey.
It became one of the touchstone stories and films of American culture and it was too much to hope that when Donald Trump visited Long Island on Wednesday night that someone might have had the wit to have the menacing orchestral theme music playing when the Republican candidate came on stage. Because Donald Trump made it clear that he is coming for New York.
“Wow. This is a big crowd,” he told a boisterous coliseum in Uniondale, Long Island, a Republican enclave even though New York has not returned a Republican since Ronald Reagan won his second term in 1984. And it has shown no love for Trump’s political turn either, emphatically returning Hillary Clinton in 2016 with 59 per cent of the vote and Joe Biden four years ago with 60 per cent. The latest Siena poll has Trump trailing Kamala Harris by 14 per centage points. Nonetheless, Trump was in an Empire State of mind on Wednesday night.
“And a very big hello to New York, and a place called Long Island which I know very well. And I’m thrilled to be back in this state I love with thousands of proud patriotic New Yorkers who are the heart and soul of America – we know that. And the reason I’m here is because it hasn’t been done in many decades ... it hasn’t been done in a long time. But we are going to win New York. And that’s the first time in many, many years that a Republican can say that. We are going to do it. We have to do it. We do it and the election nationwide is over. We take over the White House and we fix up our country. Okay?”
Even the most tenacious Trump critics have, over the past few days, found room to acknowledge that on a human and psychological level, the stress of coming through a near assassination and Sunday’s latest threat on his life must be considerable. There was a glimpse of that in Uniondale when he turned sharply, apparently seeing someone (off screen) and raising his arm defensively. He laughed at himself and explained that he thought a “mobster” was coming at him.
“You know, I got a little bit of a yip problem here,” he shouted. It was a revelatory insight into one of the most disorienting and divisive figures in US public life. One of the indisputable facts about Trump is that he is a New Yorker. It’s a fact that goads the liberal-minded in the city and state. But he has daubed the famous architectural skyline of Manhattan with his name in gold colouring and the boroughs remain, for all the emphasis on Mar-a-Lago, his spiritual home.
And it was clear on this night that he was happy to be back. For the first time in a while, Trump appeared to have tapped into the offbeat theatre he can deliver in his public appearances. He presented himself as he had been in 2016 – the feisty outsider, telling New Yorkers: “Give me a shot.”
And he struck a nostalgic note for a while, returning to the New York of his youth, when he rode paradisiacal subways.
“I used to go to school on the subway. I like to say it’s not so long ago ... but I guess it is. My parents would drop me off on the subway and I’d go to Union Turnpike or wherever. They had no fear. If you do that today you’ll have about a 75 per cent chance you will never see your child again.”
He told the audience that nobody could beat his crowds, not even Elvis, and riffed on conversations he has with his wife, former first lady Melania Trump.
“I’m the greatest of all time, even greater maybe than Elvis. Elvis had a guitar. I’d say: baby, who can do it like me. Nobody can do it like me. I’d say: how great was the speech? And she’d say ... it was good, but your hair looked terrible tonight. Or I’d say: how good was it, first lady? And she’d say, it was good but you couldn’t find your way off the stage. I was imitating Biden! Naw, you can’t be sarcastic. Sarcasm with the media doesn’t work.”
There’s always a glint of self-deprecation – safely cushioned within the megalomania – when Trump is in this mood. He has a quality rare among political figures: a talent for humour. Not the clever, urbane humour of Barack Obama, but a unique if highly imitable performance comedy. You could see the faces behind him having a good time. The weariness of recent appearances and the sullen hostility of his debate appearance had disappeared. He spoke briefly about the latest assassination attempt and praised the person who had tracked down his would-be assailant and taken his number plate.
“This could only happen with a woman – because men aren’t smart enough, I hate to tell ya fellas. She followed him and pulled up to the back of his car and started taking pictures of his licence plate. And sent them to the sheriff. Who the hell would do that? Only a woman!”
So: Kamala Harris, then?
No. Not that woman. On Monday, Trump had publicly acknowledged a call Harris had made to him after his golf course trauma, which he described as “nice”. It was a rare moment of conciliation. Here he had a different message.
“The message is it’s time to stop the lies, stop the hoaxes, stop the smears, stop the lawfare and the fake lawsuits against me and stop claiming your opponents will turn America into a dictatorship. Give me a break. Because the fact is that I am not a threat to democracy. They are.
“They are doing things in politics that have never been done before in the history of our country and worst of all with their open borders and bad elections they have made us into a third world nation that nobody ever thought possible. And God has now spared my life. It must have been God. Thank you. Not once but twice. And there are those who say he did because Trump is going to turn America around. He is going to make America great again. And we are going to bring religion back to this country.”
The theme of his message was, of course, unchanging: the United States is on the brink of marauding chaos at the hands of illegal immigrants and will be destroyed if “the most liberal senator” in the history of US politics is voted into the White House.
And here was Donald Trump’s New York serenade for 2024.
“The past three years in New York City there’s been a 29 per cent increase in robbery, a 26 per cent increase in felony and assault, a 75 per cent increase in car jacking. The [NYPD] leave every month. 200 a month. Incredible people. The trains are squalid and unsafe. Businesses are fleeing. The mobs of illegal migrants are being put up in luxury hotels at your expense while our great veterans are lying on the freezing or steaming sidewalks right outside the main entrance to where the migrants enter their hotel. Think of that. Think of it.”
The stories of migrant atrocities became darker after that, far beyond the innocent terrors conjured up by Peter Benchley five decades ago. It is clear that the Republican strategy is to double down on the immigrant demonisation. And much of it will sound utterly reprehensible to many millions of Americans and much of it will sound like common sense to another massive cohort.
Donald Trump can’t realistically hope to turn his home state, and latest polling has led some data boffins to suggest – tentatively – that Kamala Harris could yet win here in a landslide. But, somehow, this appearance by Trump in Long Island felt significant. The speech was still a whopping 90 minutes but with election day beginning to loom on the horizon, New York’s most controversial son, born in Queens in 1946, sounded as though he was back to himself, ready to make them say, at some point between now and November: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
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