Javier Rodriguez Sr is convinced that Donald Trump has a master plan.
“A lot of people don’t understand what he’s trying to do with us,” said Rodriguez, who was born in Puerto Rico. He voted for the Republican candidate twice and said he would do it again if Trump could run for a third term.
Trump visited his barbershop in the south-eastern Bronx on the final stretch of his 2024 campaign. “You guys are the same as me,” Trump, a tough-talking New Yorker who was born in Queens and made his fortune developing real estate, had told Rodriguez’s barbers wearing “Make barbers great again” T-shirts.
More recently the barbers joked that one of Trump’s diehard fans at the shop kept the cup the president drank from.
Since Trump’s visit nearly two years ago, the price of the hair gel Rodriguez uses in his salon has almost doubled. But the 61-year-old, who once registered as a Democrat, did not pin blame on the US president even as his war in Iran pushes prices higher despite his campaign pledge to curb inflation.
“The Democrats messed up so much, it will take time to fix,” Rodriguez said in between haircuts.
The Bronx, where most residents are Black or Hispanic, has become a test case for whether Trump’s appeal to working-class voters can outlast the cost-of-living squeeze triggered by the president’s war in Iran.
His gains in the longtime Democratic stronghold in the 2024 election formed part of a broader shift among Latino and Black voters. But Trump’s popularity has since fallen to record lows nationwide, as voters face falling real wages and grow uneasy with his administration’s immigration crackdown.
Among Latino voters in New York state, Trump’s favourability has dropped by 24 points since January 2024.
The backlash has created an opening for Democrats in New York, where Zohran Mamdani, the city’s mayor, has energised the party’s left with a cost-of-living agenda that includes a rent freeze on about 1mn apartments and a pledge to open public grocery stores, including one in the Bronx’s Hunts Point neighbourhood.
Still many of the president’s supporters in the Bronx, including Rodriguez, seem to be in it for the long run.
Rodriguez admits that the violence of recent immigration raids has made him uncomfortable. But he supports the idea of deporting immigrants from the country. “There’s good and bad immigrants. The bad ones damage the image of the good ones,” he said as salsa tunes played for his Latino clientele.
“If I had the money he has, I would not become president,” he said. “Donald Trump wants the best for his country.”
Christopher Calise, who came for a trim at the barbershop, agrees.
“I don’t like paying $5 for a gallon of gas, it’s killing me, but it is what it is,” Calise said. “I love Donald Trump.”
In Kingsbridge, a neighbourhood in the north-west Bronx, Juan Gomez, a building superintendent, said Trump still has his full support. “I like his personality, he is a strong guy.”
Gomez, who came to the US from the Dominican Republic, admires Trump for his immigration crackdown. “Finally someone is controlling the border,” he said.
The Bronx, which became a byword of urban despair amid an economic collapse in the 1970s, today encompasses some of the poorest US districts and suffers from high crime and unemployment. It has traditionally been a Democratic stronghold.
Yet residents are not so surprised that minority communities pivoted towards Republicans.
“Democrats brought this upon themselves,” said Desmond Knox-McKinney, 47, who runs a marketing agency and started voting for Republicans in 2020. “Democrats did nothing for the people in the Bronx. So why not give Trump a shot?”
“People voted for Trump because they wanted a new America,” said Elise Espinar, a young mother who emigrated from the Dominican Republic four years ago.
But there are pockets of discontent.
Orlando Ortiz came to the US from Puerto Rico in 1984, cleaning barbershops until he could afford his own. Now, he said: “I don’t want to die in this country anymore.”
For a Friday morning, his barbershop across the road from the one that hosted Trump in 2024 was quiet. “Some people used to come here twice a week, now they come once a week or every two weeks. They don’t have the money any more,” he said, adding that he planned to vote for Democrats in November’s midterm election.
Customers tell Ortiz they regret voting for Trump, he said. “A lot of people are mad, but they wouldn’t say it publicly.”
Yahay Obeid is one of the few whose remorse is stronger than his fear of a public backlash.
The air traffic controller, who immigrated to the US from Yemen at the age of eight, told the FT in 2024 that he cast his ballot for Trump, saying at the time he wanted to hold Democrats accountable after they took immigrants’ votes for granted.
A few months later, though, his promotion was cancelled owing to job cuts made by Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. He tried to convince himself that things might still go in the right direction, including that the president’s new tariff regime was just “threats to get us a better deal”.
But when the US joined Israel in attacking Iran in February, he decided to publicly distance himself from the Trump government in a social media post.
More than anything, Obeid is disappointed that Trump did not turn out to be the saviour he had hoped. “I thought a businessman like him will get things done. But he has nothing to show for.”
For others, Trump’s record does not seem to matter.
Shawn Williams, 52, said Trump is the first politician he has voted for in his life.
The security guard at a jewellery shop had a hard time coming up with examples of how Trump’s presidency has benefited him personally but plans on supporting Republicans in the midterms.
“Donald Trump makes me feel like, as a black man, I am a part of this country for the first time,” Williams said. “He is removing the cancer from this country.”
Data visualisation by Michael Taffe
