« I haven’t been talking about politics for a year. It’s too depressing ”, smiles a passer-by. ” We are waiting for it to happen “, adds another. Most American cities are proud to have given birth to a president. Unless his name is Donald Trump. His election to the White House in November 2016 remains all the more difficult for New Yorkers to swallow since he is a child of the Big Apple, born in Queens, who became a billionaire in real estate in Manhattan.
« It’s hard to say that a guy like him comes out of a city like New York, exclaims Joe Scaparillo, American football coach in the Bronx. For those of us who were born here, It’s a shame. I never miss an opportunity to tell my foreign friends that we are not all like him. “
A world-city populated by 37% of immigrants
During the presidential election, 78% of voters in the megalopolis of the East Coast voted for his opponent Hillary Clinton. In Manhattan, the Democrat’s score had even reached 90%. In January 2017, the day after the inauguration of the new president, 400,000 people gathered in New York for the Women’s March, followed by demonstrations around the Trump Tower, on the 5e Avenue, where the president owns an apartment.
What remains of these movements a year after taking office in this world-city populated by 37% of immigrants? Of course, his sexist and racist remarks and his immigration policy go particularly badly. ” I still can’t believe he’s our president ”exclaims Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, a young Muslim New Yorker who runs the MuslimGirl.com site, which is very popular with young American Muslims.
The return of the swastikas
« It can be difficult to mobilize ”, nevertheless recognizes Alexis Danzig, member of the group Rise and Resist, who meets every week in a different district of the city to alert passers-by on the policy of the president and to ask, always, his dismissal. “A lot of people are apathetic or don’t know vulnerable people, he continues. We do. My mother, a Jew, was born in England seventy years ago. Fascism no longer resembles that of the 1930s. But we must not be mistaken: what we are experiencing today is fascism. “
Donald Trump, he retains some supporters in the city, including rich friends in finance and real estate, solicited to finance the Republican Party. Not in the local political class, on the other hand, which is united against him, particularly on immigration and climate change. Despite this face of displayed refusal, Onleilove Alston, an African-American who chairs the association to help undocumented migrants Faith in New York, is worried: ” We see swastikas appear, and many undocumented migrants return to the shadows, for fear of being deported … “
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