President Donald Trump appears to have it out for American cities.
In every one of his presidential runs, he described life in them as if it were something out of an 1980s horror movie: “The cities are rotting and they are indeed cesspools of blood,” he said in 2022, while announcing his most recent campaign. (Though he added, “We are going to go and help them, even if they don’t want the help.” How magnanimous!)
This wasn’t just loose campaign talk. Last week, while making misleading claims about rampant crime in Washington, D.C. (despite what he said, it’s actually down), Trump suggested he could use the authority of the presidency to perform a federal “takeover” of major cities like the nation’s capital and New York City. (He may be from there, but he is not a fan.)
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Other American cities, which tend to lean left and are often home to large immigrant populations, have gotten failing grades from the president, too: Chicago is “worse than Afghanistan.” Atlanta is a veritable “killing field.” A number of California cities are “war zones and ganglands.” D.C. itself he’s previously called a “rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole.” (Dramatic, but to be honest, he sounds kind of similar to Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, who once called cities “pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.”)
“Cities become not just different, but dangerous; not just liberal, but illegitimate.”
- Yphtach Lelkes, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania
The statements are worlds apart from how Trump describes the “beautiful” towns in red states, where voters more reliably vote for him. In a stump speech last October, he bunched up “Indiana and Iowa and Idaho” as a collective and called them “states that you don’t hear too much of because they’re so good and so well run.”
His administration’s mass-deportation initiative has largely targeted Democratic-run cities; ICE has yet to reach more Trump-friendly industries in Trump-friendly parts of the country.
Deeply blue Los Angeles is a particular fixation for the White House, with some wondering if it’s because deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is from the region. Last month, when National Guard troops were deployed to L.A. during ICE raids, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the Feds were coming to “liberate” Los Angeles “from the socialists and the burdensome leadership.” (The Trump administration has also signaled that it could send the military to even more American cities.)
Had you never visited a city and bought into Trump’s anti-city screeds, you might figure that criminals roam the streets and that protests (or riots, depending on what light they’re cast in) are a threat to you, no matter how many miles away you live.
However, 80% of Americans live in or around a city. Urbanites are just as American as anyone who lives in the countryside, and what’s more, cities drive economic growth for everyone. We all benefit when cities prosper. So what’s the deal with conservatives maligning cities so hard? Is that really politically smart? For answers, we asked political science professors who specialize in the politics of polarization.
Disparaging cities is big-time fodder for a cultural war that energizes voters.
The tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them” is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Republicans have mined that for all that it’s worth, and such rhetoric reached apogee under Trump, said Jonathan Weiler, a professor of global studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
“In this case, the ‘us’ are good, hardworking, ‘real’ Americans, as Sarah Palin put it, who believe in an America that was rooted in traditional family structures, respect for authority and safe, wholesome communities,” Weiler said.
The “them,” he said, “are the forces of cultural chaos, ‘moral decay,’ engaged in a nefarious plot to undermine the wholesome America conservatives have long purported to advocate for.”
Of course, such tropes and anti-urban bias are nothing new. In the 1970s and ’80s, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority engaged in a similar city-bashing politics because it played so effectively with the televangelist’s audience, Weiler noted.
Trump’s anti-city fixation has parallels to earlier Republicans, like Richard Nixon and George Bush, who in 1988 used inner city crime to attract voters who otherwise might have voted Democratic.
Yphtach Lelkes, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said that framing cities as dangerous does more than raise concerns about crime; it signals that these places are morally and culturally different, even alien from small-town America.
“It tells rural and suburban voters that cities aren’t just far away, they’re run by people who don’t share their values,” said Lelkes, who co-directs the Polarization Research Lab, which looks at affective polarization, social trust, and political violence
“That perception fuels anger, disgust, and fear ― emotions that are powerful political motivators,” he said. “These feelings can mobilize voters, boost support for tough-on-crime or authoritarian policies, and create a strong sense of political urgency.”
It’s a message largely directed at suburbanites.
When Trump lambasts Los Angeles or Detroit, he’s not speaking to the people in those cities who loathe him or even directly to his rural base (though all the better if the base is revved up). It’s actually suburbanites he’s hoping to hook, said Kal Munis, an assistant professor of political science at Auburn University in Alabama.
“The suburbs are composed of people, both who moved to them in order to be closer to the city ― former rural and small town folks ― and those who moved to them in order to distance themselves from urban cores,” he told HuffPost.
“It’s this latter category who his message resonates with, since again, many of these people already consciously chose to move out of the city, for various reasons, with the literature suggesting crime is often a leading consideration for such moves.”
Race is definitely a part of it, but there’s more to it.
Some have suggested that because cities are ethnically diverse, “inner cities” is a covert way to talk about race: There’s a long history in American politics of using terms like “inner city” as coded language to evoke racial anxieties without explicitly mentioning race, Lelkes said.
Today’s city symbolism goes beyond that.
While race plays a role, what’s often going unsaid is a broader rejection of the values cities represent in the modern U.S.: diversity, progressivism, intellectualism, and dissent.
“It’s a culture war packaged in geography,” Lelkes said.
By no means is everyone who responds to “city v. country” rhetoric racist. Many are just drawn to candidates who promise to restore order and predictability to what feels like a chaotic and changing world.
Still, that doesn’t mean they can’t be persuaded by “demagogues who traffic in racism and think that a heavy hand is necessary to make them feel safe again.” Lelkes said.
There are parallels to how authoritarian and fascist movements denigrated city life.
Lelkes said there’s also a deeper narrative at work ― one with echoes of authoritarian and fascist movements that have historically elevated rural life as pure, traditional, and virtuous, while casting cities as corrupt, elite and morally decaying.
“That storyline simplifies the political landscape: cities become not just different, but dangerous; not just liberal, but illegitimate,” he said. “It helps transform political opponents into cultural enemies.”
A society can harbor and nurture some of the elements of fascism without becoming fascist, Weiler noted.
The rightwing populism of Trump (or of Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or the AfD in Germany) is “similarly characterized by the kinds of us versus them politics, including a demonization of certain kinds of elites, especially in academia, the media and the law and ethnocentrism that is especially focused on immigration,” he said.
Republicans will keep doing it because they don’t necessarily need voters in America’s cities.
As economist Richard McGahey notes in his book, “Unequal Cities: Overcoming Anti-Urban Bias to Reduce Inequality in the United States,” when the U.S. was founded, it was a rural country, and as such, many founding documents are openly hostile to cities. (With guys like aforementioned city hater Jefferson partly running the show, no surprise.)
“The hostility towards cities gets built into the electoral college,” McGahey said in 2023.
Opponents of the Electoral College argue that rural states hold vastly disproportionate electoral power: Even though urban and suburban areas comprise the majority of the population, their political influence is diluted by malapportionment in the Senate and gerrymandering in the House and state legislatures, Lelkes explained.
“A rural vote can carry more weight than an urban one,” he said. “That allows conservative politicians to win majorities while explicitly running against cities —and the values, demographics, and policies they represent.”
In this context, disparaging cities isn’t just symbolic — it’s strategic.
“It energizes the rural and exurban base without much political cost, because those urban voters are already packed into districts that won’t change the electoral math,” Lelkes said.
Whether conservatives will eventually need to start courting city dwellers depends on how the political geography shifts, he said.
“Suburbs are already becoming more diverse and more contested, especially in swing states. If those areas continue trending Democratic, Republicans may need to moderate their anti-urban messaging to stay competitive,” he said. “But as long as the current system rewards geographic dispersion, there’s still a strong incentive to keep running against the city ― even if the city represents the majority.”
