Mired Like A Bug In Amber

MSNBC's Scarborough busts Trump over his mugged and rape claims with a brutal fact check https://t.co/N5PXAg0Pgk

— Raw Story (@RawStory) August 21, 2024

Donald Trump has never left the '80's:

Speaking in front of law enforcement officers, a subdued and low-key Trump claimed, "You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be,” before adding, "You’ve seen it, and I’ve seen it.”

After sharing the clip, Scarborough lectured the former president with a barrage of facts.

After joking, "Donald Trump, of course, is describing the plot of [1981's] 'Fort Apache the Bronx,' it's great movie, a great reference, but it bears absolutely no semblance to what is happening right now because he says you get shot if you walk across the street."

Coming out of the '70's (a film released in '81 was created in the late '70's), the image of NYC was of a hellscape.  "Escape from New York" came out in '81, too.  Nobody at the time thought it was outlandish that NYC could become a giant prison.  Popular culture already considered it an inescapable hellhole.

I visited my brother and his wife in NYC that year.  The Lovely Wife and I regularly rode the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and never so much as got hassled by anybody, much less mugged. We did the tourist thing by day, and went out every night (opera, Broadway (Cats; original cast), PDQ Bach at Carnegie Hall).  We had wonderful time.  It was a powerful image, the image of New York as a city where you took your life in your hands walking down the street for milk and bread.  It was never absolute reality. 

But Trump is trapped in it.  He still seems to think his wealth protected him from those "mean streets" (and I'm sure there were, still are, some.  But most of us can avoid them.) but that they roil and burn and will unless his will (pitiful and puny as it really is), is imposed upon it.  Most plainly, what he knows about "the street" comes entirely from popular media, most of which came out of Hollywood.  Where, staring across the continent, Angelenos told the country what a shithole the other major city in America really was.  El "A"?  Well, "Beverly Hills Cop" came out in '84, and the streets of Los Angle-ees never looked cleaner.  Or whiter.  Eddie Murphy's cop came from Detroit, which featured briefly in the film, and looked like NYC on the Great Lakes.