Republican National Convention Heads To Milwaukee Amid Criticism From Trump and GOP

Trump called the city 'horrible' as recently as June.

Although Republican Party frontrunner Donald Trump and many Wisconsin Republicans have been critical of Milwaukee for years, the party is now preparing to descend on the city for the Republican National Convention July 15.

Despite calling the city “horrible” as recently as June and surviving a recent assassination attempt, Trump will speak at the convention.

According to NBC News, Trump has also denied that he said Milwaukee was a horrible city, telling Fox News that he was referring to its crime statistics. “We’re very concerned with crime. I love Milwaukee. I have great friends in Milwaukee. But it’s, as you know, the crime numbers are terrible,” Trump said “I was referring to also the election, the ballots, the, the way it went down. It was very bad in Milwaukee. Very, very bad.”

Even if you take Trump’s claim at face value, the second claim was conclusively disproven by a firm his campaign hired to investigate alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election. The campaign’s efforts to prove election fraud focused on Milwaukee and Madison, two overwhelmingly Democratic cities. Trump’s first claim could reasonably be seen as another in a long list of racist comments he has made, especially since, according to Data USA, Milwaukee is a majority-minority city.

According to The Guardian, Sen. LaTonya Johnson, a Democrat who represents Milwaukee, said in an interview that Republicans, including Trump, often target the city because of its makeup.

“What he said about Milwaukee being a horrible city is just one of many fabrications that the former president has made up. When people get on the ground here, they’ll see that this is a great city,” Mayor Cavalier Johnson said per NBC news. “It’s also home to thousands of Republican voters who have called Milwaukee home for some time, who raised their kids and their grandkids here, who are vital members of our society. He called their home horrible. I think it was a little bizarre for him to do, and just another in a long string of lies.”

Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Brian Schmming, meanwhile, couldn’t refrain from taking a dig at Milwaukee and other cities run by Democrats as he told the Associated Press that he hoped the RNC highlighted the positive aspects of the city that “like many other Democrat-run cities…has extraordinarily significant issues.”

According to the New York Times, coming to Milwaukee along with Trump and the RNC are approximately 120 different protest organizations.

Some protesters have decried Milwaukee’s decision to host the convention due to its solid support for the Democratic Party. But Mayor Johnson, a Democrat, has wholeheartedly embraced the city’s role as host for the RNC.

“The thing to me is that the Republican nominee is going to be nominated somewhere,” Johnson told Wisconsin Public Radio. “So what better way for us to be able to realize our ambitions for growth than to have a national political convention that’s going to be watched the world over come to Milwaukee.”