Chris Crucial: Debunking Donald Trump's New York fantasy 😂

PLUS: Pecker spills!

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1. New York, New York: Before heading into a Manhattan courtroom for his ongoing hush money trial Thursday, Donald Trump made a stop at a construction site where he made a bold prediction.

Here it is:

We are going to make a play for New York. They said, I just heard there was a very good poll that just came out….We are going to run very hard in New York. We have a very good chance of winning New York in my opinion.

Which, well:

Let’s dispense with the specifics of what Trump said first. He suggested there is a “very good poll that just came out” in New York. I could find no such poll. The most recent credible survey in New York is from the middle of the month and was conducted by Siena College. It shows Joe Biden at 47% to Trump’s 37%.

Which, honestly, isn’t bad!

But recent history suggests there is NO chance that Trump (or any Republican) will win the Empire State in a presidential election any time soon. Joe Biden won it by 23 points in 2020. Hillary Clinton beat Trump in New York by 22 points in 2016. The last Republican to win New York at the presidential level was Ronald Reagan in 1984 — when he won 49 states over Walter Mondale.

So, yeah.

Then there’s this: New York is a HUGE state with a very expensive media market in New York City. It would cost the Trump campaign tens of millions of dollars to run TV ads statewide — a necessity if he wanted to actually try to win. And there is no way — particularly given his current cash deficit to Biden — that any smart person in the campaign is going to approve that sort of expenditure.

What’s most interesting to me about this Trump brag isn’t that it is going to happen. It’s not. Rather it’s that he just keeps saying it — for the last 8+ years.

“Just so you understand, we are going to play [in] New York,” Trump said in September 2016. “You know, we’re not just doing this for fun. We’re going to play New York.”

He added: “We are going to play so hard and win. We are going to win this state. It’s going to shock people, and by the way, you know if we win this state, it’s over. We win, OK? We win.”

[Narrator: He did not “play” or “win” in New York.]

In August 2020, in an interview with the New York Post in the Oval Office, then President Trump made a strikingly similar boast.

“Over the last six months what’s happened is insane,” Trump said. “It’s insane. So we’re going to try very hard to win New York and that will be the first time — is that since Ronald Reagan, I guess? Since Ronald Reagan.”

He added: “We did well last time, but to get over 50 percent is hard for a Republican. But we’re putting New York in play. We’re going to play it very strong and very hard. And we are going to try to win New York.”

[Narrator: He did not do “well last time.” And he did not “play it very strong and very hard” in 2020 either.]

And this isn’t even the first time in this election that Trump has insisted he is going to win New York. In an early January interview with Breitbart, Trump said:

One of the other things I’m going to do — and I may be foolish in doing it — is I’m going to make a heavy play for New York, heavy play for New Jersey, heavy play for Virginia, heavy play for New Mexico, and a heavy play for a state that hasn’t been won in years, Minnesota.

So, why the New York obsession?