October 08, 2024 10:59 AM UTC

Trump Calls His Own Bluff On Aurora

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Aurora Sentinel reports, word broke late yesterday (H/T to the Colorado Times Recorder) that ex-President Donald Trump, having blown a self-imposed deadline to visit the city of Aurora, Colorado after adding the false tale of the city’s “takeover” by Venezuelan gang members to his stump speeches, will indeed make an appearance in Aurora on Friday–in the most technical sense, because the backdrop for Trump’s visit will bear little resemblance to the run-down apartment building we’ve all seen on TV:

Donald Trump’s campaign announced Monday the Republican presidential nominee will hold a rally at the Gaylord Rockies in Aurora after weeks of repeating debunked allegations about the city being overrun by Venezuelan gang members.

“Aurora, Colorado has become a ‘war zone’ due to the influx of violent Venezuelan prison gang members from Tren de Aragua,” Trump’s campaign said in a press release. “With approximately 43,000 migrants flooding the neighboring city of Denver since December 2022, many of these migrants have made their way to Aurora, bringing chaos and fear with them.”

Trump’s critics, local police and city officials — including Republican Mayor Mike Coffman — have said the allegations are untrue.

But after expressing excitement at the chance to prove to Trump that the stories he’s telling about Aurora aren’t true, Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman appears to be meekly copping out of that responsibility:

Unfortunately for Aurora’s most unreliable narrator, if Coffman wants to set Trump straight about his city, it looks like the rally will be his only opportunity. The Gaylord Rockies resort is located just south of Denver International Airport, which is also the northernmost reaches of Aurora, meaning Trump’s motorcade will be very short and never come close to the area of the city that’s the subject of this months-long campaign of misinformation (see map right). The Gaylord resort is next to Aurora’s Painted Prairie neighborhood, which is all new construction with homes in the area starting “in the low 500s.” The Gaylord resort itself is highly recommended and not cheap–though the occasional collapsing ventilation duct might put a necessary spring in your step.

The point is that there is absolutely nothing in the vicinity of the Gaylord resort to validate Trump’s contention that the city of Aurora, let alone the entire state of Colorado, has been “overrun” by foreign gang members. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more picturesque neighborhood in Aurora to showcase as proof that these months of wild speculation and exaggeration are unfounded. Colorado Republican candidates like Gabe Evans who helped spread the fiction of Aurora’s “takeover” will be left to make Trump’s lies make sense long after Trump Force One departs.

Politically, as we’ve said repeatedly, wasting precious time in October on a campaign stop in Colorado, where polling shows Trump losing to Vice President Kamala Harris by as much as 15 points, makes no sense. The best explanation we can come up with is Trump felt personally goaded into appearing in Aurora after being told to stay away from Springfield, Ohio where he falsely alleged Haitian migrants are “eating the dogs”–and simply doesn’t care if the backdrop to his appearance fails to validate the words that come out of his mouth.

It wouldn’t be Trump’s first self-inflicted mistake. But it’s the one playing out in our backyard.