Documentation, Part 2: 80 Minutes of Resentment in Syracuse: Trump Promises Electric Bills That Get Cheaper With Every Sentence

On Friday evening, Donald Trump appeared in Syracuse, New York, before around 2,500 supporters who filled the Oncenter convention center. He spoke for more than an hour and 20 minutes, and most of it was about settling scores. He insulted the state's Democrats and painted a bleak picture of the very New York he himself abandoned long ago for Florida. It never became a speech about what he planned to do. It became a list of everything that pisses him off.

"Radical Dumbocrats have turned New York into a national embarrassment: high costs, high crime, massive corruption, and communist politicians driving jobs, businesses, and prosperity out of New York State. Under Dumbocrat rule, New York has: the highest taxes in the entire country. The worst business climate in the entire country. The highest homelessness in the entire country. And MORE people are leaving New York than any other state in America."

Fact-check: Fact-check: Trump fires off eight accusations. Two have some substance. The rest turn campaign rhetoric into supposed statistics. New York is an expensive state when it comes to taxes, and in 2026 it actually ranks 50th in the Tax Competitiveness Index. Corruption isn't an invented issue either: In 2024, a bribery scheme involving 70 employees at the New York City Housing Authority, NYCHA, was exposed under then-Democratic Mayor Eric Adams. When it comes to corruption cases, however, Republicans are far ahead of Democrats. On crime, Trump's picture doesn't match New York's latest figures, which show significant declines in murders and shootings. "Communist politicians"? That's made up too. Mamdani calls himself a democratic socialist. Trump turns that into communism because it sells better from a stage. And the claim that "more people are leaving New York than any other state" is false as well. Trump takes high taxes and an old corruption case and attaches an entire string of claims that don't survive fact-checking.

Trump calls Attorney General Letitia James a "disgusting dog."

Governor Kathy Hochul took a beating over her immigration and energy policies. He called Attorney General Letitia James a "dog," repeatedly, and told New Yorkers to shout at both women on Election Day that they were fired and should get lost. He also repeated the false claim that Democrats cheat in elections. A president who stands at a podium calling female political opponents animals has long since set the tone for how his supporters talk about the country.

Trump: "I got Greenland. I hope you're happy with that. Remember? Everybody said, 'Oh, he'll never get it.' We got it, and we got it at the right price."

Fact-check: Fact-check: Trump's statement is simply false. The United States has not purchased, taken over, or annexed Greenland. Greenland remains part of the Kingdom of Denmark and continues to govern itself politically. What Trump actually obtained were expanded military access and usage rights. Onstage, he casually turns an agreement over bases and military presence into: "I got Greenland." He didn't. And "at the right price" is grandstanding bordering on the grotesque. There is no purchase price for Greenland because Greenland was never sold. Trump is selling military rights as a land purchase. This goes beyond exaggeration. It is factually wrong.

Much of what he took credit for wasn't his achievement. Trump claimed credit for chipmaker Micron's plan to invest $100 billion in as many as four semiconductor plants in the town of Clay, claiming his tariffs had attracted the company. In reality, Micron chose the Central New York region back in 2022 under Joe Biden, drawn by a Democratic incentive law and state tax benefits. The man harvests where someone else planted and calls it his own accomplishment. That's how a decision made under his predecessor becomes today's triumph, and nobody in the room confronts him with the year.

He lied about Interstate 81 too. Hochul had supposedly "destroyed" the elevated section because she declared the highway racist and redirected traffic straight into the city. In reality, engineers had determined that the roadway, built in the 1960s, had reached the end of its service life and needed to be removed. Hochul approved a city-backed plan to replace it with a street-level boulevard and reconnect a Black neighborhood that the highway had once cut in two. He uses his racism to campaign for votes. That says it all.

Of course, Mike Tyson couldn't be left out: He flew in aboard Air Force One and told the crowd: "THERE IS NO CHANCE IN THE WORLD THAT I WOULD BE HERE IF IT WASN'T FOR A PRESIDENT LIKE DONALD TRUMP."

Trump's response: "I DON'T WANT TO FIGHT HIM."

When it came to electricity, the numbers became completely arbitrary. If his guy Bruce Blakeman took office, he would cut electric bills "by 70, 80, and 90 percent." That wasn't a prediction, he insisted, it was a fact. A little later, toward the end, the numbers had become "50 to 75 percent," along with the "largest middle-class tax cut in state history." A number that changes several times during the same appearance has nothing to do with credibility anymore. It's a feeling hurled straight into the faces of the MAGA crowd.

In Syracuse, Bruce Blakeman went straight after Kathy Hochul and the Democrats. He promised lower taxes and electric bills and demanded the deportation of undocumented immigrants who committed murder, burglary, rape, robbery, or drug trafficking. He called Hochul "Clueless Kathy." He went after her particularly hard over an earlier remark in which she had suggested that Black children in New York supposedly didn't know what a computer was.

Blakeman called that "disgusting" and said every 12-year-old Black boy in New York knew more about computers than Hochul. He also accused her of believing that people in upstate New York weren't educated enough to make important decisions about their own lives. Finally, he turned the speech into an outright call to mobilize Republican voters: Vote for Trump, secure the Republican majority in Congress, and send more Republicans to the state Senate and Assembly. His sharpest political message was that more and more longtime Democrats were switching to the Republicans because their party no longer represented them. Then came the line everything had been building toward: "They hate America, and we love America. And we love Donald J. Trump."

Fact-check: Fact-check: Blakeman didn't deliver a political speech. He delivered a mixture of insults, fear, and party propaganda. He turned Hochul's clumsy remark about Black children into a public humiliation act, mentioned immigrants in the same breath as murder, rape, and drug trafficking, and ended by practically declaring Democrats to be America-haters. The level of discourse was exactly what you'd expect: Very low.

Blakeman, 71, the Nassau County executive, is challenging Hochul for governor. This was Trump's third campaign stop in New York this year and his first upstate, part of an October tour intended to drive his supporters to the polls ahead of the midterm elections. As he entered, he greeted the crowd from the "beautiful shores of Lake America," the name he had given Lake Ontario by executive order in August, in the middle of the trade war with Canada. A poll the previous month found that 75 percent of upstate residents opposed the renaming. Shortly afterward, he told New Yorkers they were sitting on some of the world's largest oil reserves but weren't allowed to touch them. He meant natural gas, which the state prohibits extracting. A man who renames a lake and confuses oil with gas governs with his finger planted on a map he hasn't bothered to read.

The speech jumped from one subject to another, from Norway to taxes and from welfare to "illegal aliens." For the high prices squeezing his own voters, all he had to offer was the claim that prices were falling "pretty quickly." The crowd roared loudest when he railed against "illegal aliens" and the "mutilation" of transgender people. The anger got the applause. The bills got a platitude.

The real purpose of the evening wasn't Syracuse. It was November. Less than a month before the midterm elections, Trump is traveling across the country urging his people to get out and vote. The instrument of that appeal is anger, not a promise he could actually keep. The less someone has to offer, the louder the enemy he points to has to be.

Protesters interrupted him four times, and each was escorted out to chants of "USA, USA." As he talked about taking office in 2017, a woman near the exit turned around one last time and gave him both middle fingers before waving to the crowd. Trump called the hecklers "paid by radical left scum" and "losers." He asked whether another was a friend or an enemy, then decided he was a "stupid guy." He mocked one by saying the man's mother was calling him right then, and that she was voting for Trump. He offered no evidence for the alleged payments. At one of his appearances earlier this week, a man wearing a red cap grabbed a heckler by the hair and threw him to the ground, prompting Trump to ask from the podium whether there was anything more beautiful than one of his rallies. Two days earlier in San Antonio, protesters had interrupted him at least six times.

The crowd made its hatred of the press perfectly clear. People booed the photographers' platform and shouted at reporters to get lost, while many openly voiced their contempt for the journalists covering the event. But that's part of the job. In the same week that his secretary of state is screening out foreign critics at the border, his supporters are screaming at reporters inside his own rally.

Loyalty has its limits, and the schedule exposed them. The doors opened at 3 p.m. Some people had lined up as early as 4:30 a.m. and stood shoulder to shoulder in pajama pants and sequined jackets until their patience began to wear thin. Trump didn't enter the arena until around 8:11 p.m., more than an hour later than announced, and as the speech dragged past 9 p.m., the stands began to empty. One person leaving joked that if he stayed any longer, he'd end up voting for Hochul. An earlier survey had found that only four of 16 local Republican officials and party figures planned to attend Trump's first speech in Syracuse in 10 years. Even his own party preferred to stay home.

Trump entered to Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" and danced his way out to "YMCA." Traveling with him, as mentioned earlier, were former heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson and border czar Tom Homan, himself a native of upstate New York, along with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Also aboard Air Force One were Representatives Claudia Tenney from the Oswego district and Nick Langworthy from the Buffalo area. Republican candidates had spent two hours warming up the crowd, including Kailee Buller, who is trying to unseat Representative John Mannion. Blakeman promised that, as governor, he would end the state's "sanctuary" policies on day one, eliminating protections for undocumented immigrants.

Outside, another Syracuse stood against him. Around 2,500 people gathered in Clinton Square to protest him, exactly as many as were cheering inside. About 1,500 marched to the Oncenter and remained behind barricades as the motorcade arrived. "Donald Trump has got to go," they chanted, as a student reporter documented.

The gathering against him had a name. "Not in Our House" was what two local coalitions, Indivisible Onondaga County and the CNY Solidarity Coalition, called it. Signs read "Impeach" and "This Orange Is Not Welcome in Syracuse." Union members and activists spoke, along with local politicians. The issues ranged from climate change to the hunt for migrants, and the war in Iran was part of it too. Mayor Sharon Owens joined the protest and called for the abolition of ICE. It was a divided moment for the city, she said, with people holding very different views about the direction of the country. One co-organizer later spoke of hope. The day didn't feel lonely, and more people had shown up than expected.

Several elected officials stood among the crowd, including State Senator Rachel May and City Councilwoman Donna Moore, along with county politicians Mo Brown and Elaine Denton. May said she never thought she'd see Trump in Central New York again and that his policies were hurting the region. She pointed to colleges and universities, farmers' diesel prices, and the shattered relationship with Canada. She called the local Republicans' decision to stay away from the event cowardice. Mo Brown, an avowed democratic socialist, told the president that his values were not Central New York's values and that his visit was an insult.

The voices in the crowd carried the same exhaustion. Pam Dahlin, 71, brought a Canadian flag because she no longer dared to display her own. She no longer recognized her country. Lori Schmidt, 66, a veteran of the Army and Air Force Reserve, had driven more than an hour with her friend Lydia Green, 63, who immigrated from Switzerland. The president was putting the Constitution through a shredder, Schmidt said, and what he was doing affected active-duty service members and veterans alike. Gayle Davis, 73, fears for the retirement benefits and health insurance she worked her entire life for while he just keeps getting richer. A teacher, Martin Boatwright, 61, said some of his students feared being picked up by ICE, while others were coming to class hungry after their food assistance was cut.

Toward evening, several hundred people pressed against the barricades at the War Memorial, with some police officers standing in front of them in protective gear. "No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA" echoed across the street, while others shouted "ICE, KKK, IDF," followed by "all the same." One man pulled down his pants and displayed his message against the president on his skin. As Trump began speaking inside, the crowd slowly dispersed. One flag was conspicuously absent that evening, the American flag, and where it did appear, it was hanging upside down.

Also read our: Documentation Part 1: “Pretend I’m running”: Trump’s campaign against his own impeachment

An appearance that delivers nothing has to get louder to cover up what's missing. What Trump handed out in Syracuse wasn't a political program. It was the same resentment he's been serving up for years, while the bills sitting on kitchen tables never go down. Electric bills only get cheaper in his sentences, the lake keeps its old name on everyone else's lips, and the arena that had been eagerly awaiting him before sunrise was already half empty before he spoke his final word. What remained was the noise, and that noise is already traveling to the next city this weekend, where the same speech awaits a new audience.