Donald Trump invokes the darkest days of urban decay and crime to appeal to his base.

The facts speak to an urban triumph that has led to greater national prosperity and higher standards of living for tens of millions of Americans.

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The Republican campaign went back in time last week. Not to the 1950s Red Scare, to the 1844 Nativist Riots, or to the Great Awakening of the 1740s—though it had elements of all of those. It went back to the 1970s. And it went back to a specific place: the Bronx. 
 
It was in the decade of disco that the Bronx descended into one of the worst epidemics of violence and urban decay that the United States has ever seen. It was the culmination of white flight, corporate flight, disinvestment, racist lending practices, overzealous policing, drug criminalization, poor education, lead poisoning, and so many other negligences and offenses that left the borough in ashes and left so many other cities in similar states of decay.    
 
At the same moment that the Bronx was burning, a borough and a world away, a young Donald Trump was plotting his first business deals. His father was reportedly evicting African-Americans from his properties in Queens. Whether their crimes will prove greater than the theft and looting of his fellow New Yorkers will be for history to judge. 
 
In 1975, Gerald Ford proverbially told New York City to drop dead. Last week, after four decades of progress Donald Trump tried to bury it again. 
 
In his acceptance speech at the Republication National Convention, Trump cited a litany of urban horrors that have supposedly festered in the past eight years: 
  • "Violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities"
  • "Crime, terrorism, and lawlessness that threatens our communities" 
  • "Homicides last year increased by 17% in America's fifty largest cities. That's the largest increase in 25 years."
  • "In our nation's capital, killings have risen by 50 percent. They are up nearly 60 percent in nearby Baltimore."
  • "In the president's hometown of Chicago, more than 2,000 have been the victims of shootings this year alone. And almost 4,000 have been killed in the Chicago area since he took office."
  • "Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are in third world condition"
Claims and statistics like these are rightfully chilling.
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Trump can get away with these distortions because he's not trying to appeal to urbanites in the first place. He's not standing in solidarity with the good citizens of Chicago, New York, and Baltimore. Bafflingly, his electorate has made its disdain for "New York elitism" well known. He's creating an image of inner cities that enables the citizens (good and bad) of suburbia and the rural heartland to believe in their own worst visions of the city. These visions may have been semi-legitimate reasons for middle class families to flee cities in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, they are fabrications meant only to support their lifestyle choice at the expense of all things bustling and cosmopolitan.