Trump set to hold rally at NYC’s Madison Square Garden - despite him having no shot of winning in Manhattan

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump plans to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden in late October.

“We just rented Madison Square Garden. We’re gonna make a play for New York — hasn’t been done in a long time,” Trump told a Scranton, Pennsylvania crowd on Wednesday.

The former president’s campaign event is scheduled for October 27, NBC News reported. The rally will mark the first time that Trump will speak to his supporters in his deep-blue hometown.

A campaign official told the outlet that Trump hopes to host “major arena rallies” in “battleground states” in the last few weeks ahead of the November 5 election. New York, of course, is not one of them. The Independent has emailed a spokesperson from the Trump campaign for more information.

Trump earned just 12.3 percent of the vote in 2020 in Manhattan, or New York County, compared to Joe Biden’s 86.8 percent. The GOP nominee lost by an even greater percentage in 2016 when he garnered just 10 percent of Manhattan’s vote compared to Hillary Clinton’s 87.2 percent.

Despite his campaign’s swing-state-focused plans, Trump will also be visiting two consistently blue states later this week: California and Colorado.

Trump had initially floated the idea of holding a rally at the massive arena in May, days before he was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records by a New York City jury after he gave so-called hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.

The former president was also found liable for defamation and sexual abuse of writer E Jean Carroll. The former Elle columnist had sued Trump for raping her in a dressing room at a Bergdorf Goodman in New York in 1996, and then “destroying” her reputation when he claimed she was lying. He was not found liable for rape.

Earlier this year, he held rallies in the Bronx and on Long Island in the New York City metro area.

His May rally in the Bronx — also a Democratic stronghold — marked the first time Trump had held a rally in his home state in eight years. In 2016, his supporters gathered upstate in Buffalo during his first presidential run.

Trump has repeatedly complained about New York City’s crime rates.

“Everything is corrupt in New York,” he said on Wednesday. “The migrants have taken over Madison Avenue. They’ve taken over Fifth Avenue. They’ve taken over the parks.”

During the hush money trial, he even baselessly suggested that people were being “mugged and killed outside” the courthouse. Now, his son Barron Trump goes to college in Manhattan and his wife Melania still lives in the city with Barron, she recently revealed in a Fox & Friends interview.

It’s not immediately clear what time the former president’s Madison Square Garden rally will be held, but singer-songwriter Kany García is slated to perform at the arena at 8pm that evening.