City Comptroller and mayoral wannabe Brad Lander’s laundry list of “significant threats” to New York City from the second Trump term hit us with major déjà vu — thanks to the 2017 warnings issued at the behest of Lander’s model, Bill de Blasio.
In late February 2017, NYC & Co. — the city’s tourism and marketing arm, controlled by then-Mayor de Blasio — predicted Trump’s “recent travel ban and related rhetoric” would cancel an estimated 300,000 tourism visits from abroad, slamming Broadway and the hospitality industry.
As with most everything Blas (or Lander), the shameless and overwrought “Chicken Little” predictions proved . . . utterly false.
Almost a year later, de Blasio announced that the city had set a tourism record in 2017 — 49.7 million domestic and 13.1 million international visitors.
Both numbers were all-time highs and represented a 3.8% boost over 2016.
Broadway League stats showed that the 2017-18 season grossed $1.7 billion as theater attendance neared 14 million — up from $1.45 billion in revenue and 13 million attendees in 2016-17.
Today, Lander’s biggest concerns boil down to Team Trump threatening the multibillion-dollar federal gravy train that funds the nonprofit-industrial complex he and other Democrats lean on for political support.
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Meanwhile, New Yorkers still await Lander’s risk assessment of the disastrous criminal reforms and sanctuary-city laws that, along with the Biden migrant crisis, have seen neighborhoods and commercial strips overrun with levels of criminality not seen in decades.
Once again, progressives are proving utterly out of touch with the concerns and priorities of ordinary New Yorkers.
Everyday New Yorkers know the city didn’t suffer under Trump administration policies.
What sent the city into an economic tailspin was the 1-2 punch of 2019 state “criminal justice reforms” followed by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s extended and extreme COVID lockdowns — and then the Biden-welcomed waves of “asylum seekers.”
Trump may threaten to move Lander’s cheese, but his policies are the reverse of a threat to NYC.