‘Smiling his ass off’: How Trump used the New York bodega visit to return to form

There was Donald Trump, the former president, back in his element and enjoying himself in a crowd, posing for photographs, overstating his standing in the polls and suggesting that he is serious — truly — about winning an impossibly Democratic state.

Maybe it was calculated. The setting, a bodega where a man was fatally stabbed in 2022, certainly was. And maybe Trump’s freewheeling performance was, too.

But not far from where he rode down the escalator on his way to the White House in 2015, Trump’s appearance on Tuesday was a reminder of Trump’s ability not only to manufacture a sideshow, but to turn it into the main act — more Trump the thirsty tabloid character than Trump the former president or Trump the accused.

And if the opening two days of Trump’s criminal trial exposed the cost to his presidential campaign of his confinement to a New York courtroom, his bodega visit laid bare the opportunities.

“There’s something to be said for him believing that this trial — and the timing of this trial — could have a reverse effect on silencing him,” said Alice Stewart, a Republican strategist and veteran of past presidential campaigns. “Hours on end in a courtroom are tiring and excruciating. But once he’s outside the courtroom, he’s able to make up for lost time.”

On Tuesday, Trump said he will “campaign locally” during the trial. And the bodega visit was likely just the first of many such appearances. His advisers have said, even on some trial days, to expect in-person and virtual events. This week, it was almost like a “Trump for governor” or “Trump for mayor” campaign that never was — the whole episode barely connected to the idea of the presidency.

“Everything is screwed up in New York,” Trump said, “and the whole world is watching.”

It was a stretch for Trump to say that he will “make a heavy play for New York,” a state that has not voted for a Republican for president since 1984, and one where Trump lost to now-President Joe Biden by more than 23 percentage points in 2020.

But as he spoke with reporters in New York, a bastion of Democratic politics, Trump’s read of the news landscape — if not the political one — seemed spot on. In the media capital of the world, Trump said he suspected there was “more press here than there is if I went out to some nice location.”

“He’s right,” said Dave Catalfamo, a Republican consultant in New York.

Trump’s prosecutors had given Trump a “platform,” Catalfamo said, and the former president “takes advantage of his masterfully.”

“The way we consume our news now, and the way that he gets covered, he’s utilizing the stage that’s before him,” Catalfamo said.

The substance of Trump’s visit was a throwback to Trump’s messaging in the 2020 campaign, when, following the anti-police protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder — and in an effort to replicate the Nixonian “law and order” rhetoric of half a century ago — he laced into Democrats for crime in the nation’s largest, Democratic-run cities.

But now, amid Trump’s own legal entanglements, the subject served another purpose for him — casting doubt on the legal system, much as he did the electoral system in 2020, portraying his accusers as partisans in an effort to discredit them.

Outside the bodega, Trump called his trial “rigged” and said of the judge overseeing his case, “There’s never been a judge so conflicted as this.”

Trump has repeatedly claimed that Justice Juan Merchan has conflicts of interest, and Trump's lawyers have unsuccessfully asked the judge to step down from the case. Last year, a New York judicial ethics panel rejected Trump's allegations that Merchan is biased, concluding “the judge's impartiality cannot reasonably be questioned.”

There’s reason to think Trump may be having some success in this line of critique. Earlier this week, an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found 44 percent of Americans are “not very” or “not at all” confident that prosecutors in New York are treating Trump fairly, and another 22 percent who are only “somewhat confident” they are.

But no matter where viewers stood on Trump, they could at least see in his appearance on Tuesday the kind of joy-riding former president they recognized.

That is in sharp contrast to his time in court, which by most accounts has been a comedown for him. The crowd of MAGA fans assembled outside the county courtroom was thin. On Monday, it appeared possible that he briefly dozed off. On Tuesday, Merchan scolded Trump for muttering.

But on Tuesday afternoon? Outside the Sanaa Convenient Store, the Harlem bodega where clerk Jose Alba fatally stabbed a customer who was attacking him — and who was initially charged with murder, before the charges were later dropped — Trump was back on familiar ground.

He said, “We’re way ahead in the polls against Biden,” even though the race is much closer than he describes. He said that, trial or not, he will be doing rallies “all over the place.”

Supporters whistled and cheered, breaking into chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump,” and “U.S.A., U.S.A.” Trump, who was neither dozing off nor muttering, told people in the crowd to “have a good time.”

The visit, said Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic strategist based in New York, was a signature example of Trump using “national television coverage as an advertising tool without having to pay for the gross rating points.”

“He’s very smart,” Sheinkopf said. “Anybody who understates his capacity to use PR as opposed to normative political techniques is wrong. He’s very good at it, and what it does … it wipes away the things that people are trying to do to undercut his capacities.”

It’s hard to paint Trump as overburdened by the legal system, or absent from the campaign trail, or asleep in a courtroom, he said, when he is on a street in New York “smiling his ass off.”