President Donald Trump, soured on the city he has long called home and its leadership by Democrats, on Thursday ripped into it on a number of scores, not least of which, he said, was anger over a Black Lives Matter sign painted outside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets.
"New York is not recognizable," he told Fox News' Sean Hannity on Thursday night.
Among Trump's points, he faulted Mayor Bill de Blasio for accepting the U.S. government's help during the coronavirus pandemic, only to throw "a big Black Lives Matter sign right down the middle of Fifth Avenue.
"The city is a city that's enraged," Trump said on "Hannity."
"New York is not the place that it was. Everyone is leaving. They're moving to Florida. They're moving to other places. It's very sad, actually, to see what happened."
Trump also said Democrat leaders in New York City, Chicago and Atlanta are playing politics and refusing help despite surges in violent crime.
"Crime is way up, shootings are way up, murder is way up. It's just unbelievable," he said. And it's not just New York, he added: "Chicago — what's going on in Chicago — we are looking at it very seriously because we're going to have to do something.
"We're really supposed to be asked to come in and help, the federal government, and we have the greatest people in the world and we can solve it ... but Illinois, they don't want to ask. You look every weekend and every week in Chicago, it's numbers that are not believable. Atlanta is starting to have some problems. So we're ready to act and at some point we may have to act anyway," he added. "We may have to do it sooner rather than later."
The subject of rising violence in urban centers has been much on the president's mind of late, after protests over the death of George Floyd and for social justice also gave rise to instances of rioting, vandalism and looting.
On Seattle breaking up the CHOP zone in Capitol Hill last week, Trump said the city acted after the federal government gave them notice that they were ready to go in and take the area back. It had been taken over, in a sense, by protesters as an act of defiance amid the Floyd protests, with police being kept out — a situation that escalated to fatal shootings.
"We were going in very soon and we would have taken the CHOP, we would have taken it back very easily. Frankly, the people gave up. They were tired,” Trump said.
Circling back to the coronavirus, which has also been a major test for his administration, Trump also lamented the fact that he provided so much help to New York City amid the coronavirus pandemic despite political attacks from de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
"I was very nice to Mayor de Blasio," Trump said. "I got him ventilators when he needed them; I got him hospital help when he needed it. I got him everything he needed. I got him the gowns, the masks; I got him everything, the shields. I got them everything."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.