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Former President Donald Trump held a rally in the South Bronx, a Democratic stronghold, where he continued his polarizing rhetoric by attacking American cities as crime-ridden and immigrant-flooded danger zones. Trump's extreme rhetoric is not new, as he has previously made similar claims about cities like Baltimore and Chicago. Despite crime rates falling over the past decades, Trump's anti-crime and anti-immigrant rhetoric remains a powerful issue for him and Republicans. Conservative policy planners are now detailing how a second Trump administration can go after cities, with proposals ranging from withholding federal grants to eliminating fair housing regulations. However, attacking cities and encouraging hostility between them and their surrounding suburbs is bad policy, as cities are the drivers of America's economic prosperity. Trump's anti-city rhetoric may help him politically, but his policies would hurt the country economically.
