(New York) “I can’t have a fair trial in New York!” “: Donald Trump had this cry from the heart when reacting Thursday to his criminal indictment. As if he recognizes that his hometown where he built his fortune and fame has always been hostile to him.

His shock election in November 2016 as President of the United States was shockingly badly received in Manhattan by protesters shouting “New York hates Trump!” “.

At the time, the New York Times (NYT) and the BBC reported on the “love” of the 45th American president for this megalopolis which does not “love him back”, a city where, ultimately, Donald Trump “hates to be hated”.

Arriving Monday evening in his Trump Tower on the mythical and ostentatious 5th Avenue, on the eve of his historic court appearance, the billionaire may have been a little reassured with a few supporters who sang “We love Trump!” (“We love Trump!”).

But he must not have appreciated hostile signs calling for “lock him up” and “throw away the key.”

For political science professor Brian Arbour, New York’s “main reason for aversion” to Donald Trump is that “it’s a city of immigrants.”

In this extraordinary cultural mosaic of 8.5 million souls “many of the inhabitants are immigrants or their parents or grandparents were immigrants and remain very attached to their roots”, reports to AFP this teacher at John Jay College at City University of New York (CUNY).

So much so that “his anti-immigrant policies” and “tough, fiery, racist rhetoric are particularly dire in a city where so many residents believe the vibrancy and growth emanates from foreign communities,” Arbor points out.

Politically, New York has been a “strongly Democratic city for more than a century”, according to Mr. Arbour, and this was confirmed with former far-left mayor Bill de Blasio (2014-2021) replaced on January 1, 2022. by a councilor more to the right, but still from the Democratic Party, the former African-American policeman Eric Adams.

And while “if Republicans did better” in the City and in far more rural and conservative New York State in the last midterm elections in November, it was “primarily due to the issue of criminality “, further analyzes the professor of political science.

Born in the huge working-class borough of Queens on June 14, 1946, Donald J. Trump grew up in a New York environment from Protestant European immigration: his father Fred Trump was born in 1905 in the Bronx and descended from a German immigrant. His mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was born in 1912 in Scotland. The Trump parents died in 1999 and 2000.

Educated in a military school, he had joined the family business after studying business. But contrary to the legend he has built for himself, there is nothing “self-made man” about him. After World War II, her father had already built a real estate empire in New York by building middle-class apartment buildings in working-class neighborhoods.

Donald Trump took over the reins of the company in the 1970s with solid paternal financial assistance, before becoming a television star thanks to his famous reality TV show The Apprentice.

In her 2022 biography (Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America) NYT political reporter Maggie Haberman writes that the “dynamics that defined New York in the 1980s shaped and marked Donald Trump for decades. decades. Like he was frozen in that time.”

In an article in September, the NYT deciphered its journalist’s thesis: “One cannot really understand Donald Trump unless one is familiar with the vaporous, theatrical and histrionic customs and codes of the New York political and economic scene. “.