NEW YORK Most of the speakers at former President Donald Trump s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday trained their fire on Vice President Kamala Harris and the various national issues they see as her weak points.

But among the handful of colorful New York City-area speakers, there was a strong undercurrent of outer-borough reactionary rage about the citys decline due to an uptick in crime, or some vaguer grievance that could easily be interpreted as nostalgia for a time when the citys political elite looked and sounded a bit more like the angry voices on talk radio shows.

These are the kind of people Trump rubbed elbows with during his tabloid heyday in the 1980s, when he was funding full-page newspaper ads calling to reinstate the death penalty while the Central Park Five, a group of young Black and Latino men accused of a brutal rape, was being wrongfully imprisoned. They were since exonerated.