Donald Trump’s Message to Milwaukee (2024)

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Donald Trump has long cultivated an image as a salt-of-the-earth, everyday American who loves the parts of the nation that elitist liberals dismiss as flyover country. That’s why the Republican National Convention this year is in Milwaukee, the largest city in Wisconsin—a state that Trump narrowly lost in 2020, and which is a must-win for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. Now that the RNC has fixed its website to feature a picture of Milwaukee rather than Ho Chi Minh City, the former president has his own words of praise.

“Milwaukee, where we are having our convention, is a horrible city,” he said during a closed-door meeting with Republican members of Congress today, according to Axios and Punchbowl News.

As we near the nine-year mark of the Trump era of American politics, the game of “imagine if Barack Obama had done it” or even “imagine if Mitt Romney had done it” can feel tired. And yet it’s still worth playing. Really: Imagine if Obama had trashed the major city of the crucial swing state that was hosting his party’s convention! This is a politician who was tarred as an out-of-touch elitist for his mere mention of arugula at Whole Foods. The next cycle, his campaign was so desperate to seem sympathetic to authentic local culture that Michelle Obama praised the “great barbecue” in Charlotte, North Carolina, ahead of the Democratic National Convention, puzzling even the city’s mayor. (“I have had great barbecue in Charlotte that’s been brought in on a truck,” he said, alluding to the fact that the state’s famous smoked pork is not typically associated with his relatively bland city.)

Read: A war on blue America

Trump’s disdain for American cities is one of his most consistent personality traits. His aspersions on Milwaukee were cast from Washington, D.C., another city for which he has little use. “It was also very sad driving through Washington, D.C., and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti,” he said last year after a trip to the capital to plead not guilty to federal charges related to his attempt to steal the 2020 election. He also called the city a “filthy and crime ridden embarrassment to our nation,” which is funny from someone accused of committing crimes there. Lately he has been complaining about his own hometown, following his felony conviction in New York City in May.

Some Trump allies have denied the reports that he disparaged Milwaukee. Glenn Grothman and Scott Fitzgerald, both Republican congressmen from Wisconsin, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Trump’s comment reflected his concerns about election integrity in 2020. Their colleague Derrick van Orden, meanwhile, posted on X that Trump was specifically talking about “the CRIME RATE in Milwaukee.” And yet another Wisconsin Republican, Bryan Steil, suggested that there was no comment at all. “I was in the room,” he posted. “President Trump did not say this.”

These guys might have benefited from taking a minute to get their story straight, especially given what we already know about Trump. Pick a major city, and there’s a good chance you can find him denigrating it. “We can’t let Los Angeles, San Francisco and numerous other cities destroy themselves by allowing what’s happening,” he said in 2019. The following year he added: “Look what’s happened to San Francisco, so sad what’s happened when you see a slum. It’s worse than a slum, there’s no slum like that. What they’ve done to San Francisco is a crying shame.” (That hasn’t stopped him from co-owning a property in town or raising a pile of campaign cash there last week.) Baltimore: a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Atlanta: “in horrible shape and falling apart (and not to mention crime infested).” Philadelphia: “Bad things happen in Philadelphia. Bad things.”

Read: Red state, blue city

You don’t have to look too hard to see a couple of common threads here: These cities are all overwhelmingly Democratic, and most of them are heavily Black. Washington gave Trump just 5.4 percent of its vote in 2020, though that was up from 4 percent in 2016. Huge numbers of Democratic votes in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, big Black population centers, helped Biden win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia in 2020. (Trump continues to insist this was only because of fraud, as Fitzgerald and Grothman suggested, but no evidence exists for fraud that would have affected the result.)

That’s part of Trump’s game here. Insulting a town like Milwaukee won’t help him inside the city limits, but he wasn’t going to win many votes there anyway. Blue cities are often in tension with more conservative areas of their home states. By attacking these urban centers as hellholes, he might gin up anger among white suburban, exurban, and rural voters outside of them, and use that to make up his margin. It’s a microcosm of his broader political strategy, which is less to win over swing voters than to run up margins with his base.

But the president is, at least in theory, a president for all Americans, not just the ones who elected him. These attacks on the urban areas where most people in the United States live are a warning about how he would govern in his second term. (In short: much like the first, only more so.) Elsewhere, Trump has been pretty scathing about the nation as a whole, as Ed Kilgore pointed out last year.

“We are a failing nation,” Trump said last year. “We are a nation that lost its confidence, willpower, and strength. We are a nation that has lost its way.” One starts to wonder why he wants to lead it—and whether he even likes it much in the first place.