After the second day of his criminal trial in New York, Donald Trump headed uptown to a Harlem bodega, where he bad-mouthed the judge in his case and tried to fearmonger about crime and “migrants,” even tenuously connecting the two.
Once proceedings wrapped up in Manhattan Criminal Court, which saw the selection of seven members of the jury in his hush money case, Trump stepped inside the Sanaa Convenient Store. There, clerk Jose Alba fatally stabbed a man in apparent self-defense two years ago, and was later charged with murder. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office later dropped the charge.
Alba was not present in the store Tuesday, but Trump did speak with the establishment’s co-owner, Maad Ahmed, as well as Francisco Marte, a small business advocate, according to The New York Post. Ahmed told the outlet he will be voting for Trump “because he’s a strong guy.”
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Trump told the men that clerks in bodegas like theirs should be allowed to have guns.
“If you have a gun, then you’d never get robbed,” he said. “You’d never get robbed. That would be the end of it.”
Once on the street again, Trump immediately began criticizing Judge Juan Merchan.
“We have a judge who is absolutely out of place. He should not be allowed to do it. He’s conflicted like nobody's ever been conflicted,” Trump claimed, a similar message to the one he’s blasted out on social media in recent days.
Trump is currently prohibited by a partial gag order from speaking about witnesses, but not from criticizing Merchan. Relatedly, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is seeking to hold Trump in contempt for posting about Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, two key witnesses in the case, which centers around a string of allegedly falsified business records meant to cover up hush-money payments meant to hide Trump’s affair with Daniels from the public.
Trump then predictably insisted that his trial is “rigged” against him.
“And also, there’s no crime,” added the man accused of 34 felony counts. “You know where the crime is? In the bodegas, where they come and rob them every week, or more than that.”
Trump also fearmongered about “migrants” who “take over everything” in New York and who have “destroyed so many people.”
