Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump targeted Aurora in his latest string of miscreant campaigns intended to strike fear in Americans in hopes they vote to return him to the White House.
But after he packed up his barrage of lies, exaggerations, demonization and caustic allies last week, it was his campaign and tattered reputation that was decimated by his visit.
Rallying tens of thousands of residents to hate on minorities and immigrants illustrated who he is, and what his campaign stands for.
For weeks, Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, have alternated delivering a supercharged package of lies and conspiracies about Springfield, Ohio and also Aurora.
The two top-of-the-ticket GOP candidates have both insisted that hard-working, community-minded Haitian immigrants in Springfield are unsuitable to make their home in the United States, and that they eat household pets they steal from their neighbors.
Even Republicans in Ohio have demanded Trump cease the hateful and dangerous, delusional rhetoric.
Here, Trump was inspired by Aurora Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky’s tour de force appearances on Fox News and other right-wing media outlets. She spent days promoting a local version of the Springfield anti-immigrant demonization. Jurinsky capitalized on shoddy apartments — which Mayor Mike Coffman said were operated by “slumlords” — and the questionable placement there of possibly hundreds of Venezuelan refugee immigrants by Denver aid agencies. Jurinsky wildly exaggerated the threat of Venezuelan gangs, attracting the attention of Trump and his campaign with her insistence that the media, police and city staffers were hiding the gravity of the problem, and that gangs had “overrun” apartment buildings and streets in northwest Aurora.
Within days, Aurora garnered a false international reputation of being a gang-infested cesspool.
The stunning deceit was clearly designed to play into the anti-immigrant narrative Trump and some Republicans hope will frighten Americans into voting their ticket.
Reasonable and thoughtful Aurora residents, especially those who have lived here for more than a few years, recognize the lies and political propaganda for what they are.
Aurora is a tough city, populated by nearly 400,000 people who have been misjudged and mistreated before.
Aurora is a city where more people of color call home than white residents do. This is a city where tens of thousands of people were born in another country. This is a city where more than 100 languages other than English are spoken at home, and it’s been that city for decades.
Aurora is a city that was hoodwinked by developers in the 1970s promising to build a massive Disney-like destination called “Science Fiction Land.” City officials were ridiculed for their naiveté, and then they regrouped.
Once tabbed by a Denver Post political cartoonist for years as the city of “one tree,” it has long moved past its reputation of being a barren prairie of tract-housing.
It’s been called “Saudi Aurora” and shunned for generations as Denver’s lowly step-city. This is the city, however, that outsmarted Colorado Springs and Denver to snag the largest hotel and conference center in the state, the Gaylord Rockies, which was host to Trump’s spiteful rally last week.
It is the city that has amassed one of the largest holdings of water in the state. Aurora was the city that outsmarted Denver into becoming the new home of the University of Colorado Medical School and University Hospital, anchor to the Anschutz Medical and Bioscience Campus, which drew Children’s Hospital Colorado and the VA Hospital for the region.
Aurora has not just maintained an active military base, it’s home to one of the few of the nation’s Space Force bases. The Aurora Reservoir draws thousands of people each summer to celebrate and honor the community’s LGBTQ+ residents, friends and families during one of the largest Pride celebrations in the state.
It’s a city that offers not just a mix of dozens of cultures and languages from around the globe, it capitalizes on them. Aurora is where residents and tourists alike can eat from around the globe, just by going around the block.
This is a city that has survived and moved past the Aurora theater shooting, the Chuck E. Cheese’s murders, the Labor Day Massacre and a host of other tragedies that befall large cities just like Aurora, across the nation, and across the globe.
When gang problems heated up in Aurora and the metro area in the 1980s, the community launched the Aurora Gang Task Force and became national leaders in community policing and providing school resource officers.
While the hate and cruelty Trump brought to Aurora, and shared with others, causes real and grave danger to all immigrants and all people of color, his ruthlessness and rhetoric will fade as the city moves past his corruption, too.
This is a community of survivors, honor and decency. Many, if not most, of the Venezuelan refugees who now all Aurora home, among tens of thousands of other immigrants and people of color, intrepidly walked here from South America. The Venezuelan immigrants, and all immigrants, need the community’s assistance and patience to become just another interesting segment of the most diverse city in Colorado.
Trump’s toxic deceits will recede, just like the rest of the city’s hurdles, and the community will be stronger for it. That’s the real story of Aurora.
Like everything, people, ideas, and forgettable politicians fade. My hope is Jurinski and Trump join hands and fade into the sunset – quickly! They offer nothing for real people!
“The Venezuelan immigrants, and all immigrants, need the community’s assistance and patience to become just another interesting segment of the most diverse city in Colorado.”
LOL, yeah, like those TdA gangsters in San Antonio that were running child prostitution out of four apartment buildings in the city, or the ones in Aurora that that threatened residents and beat up the CBZ representative. I’m sure those poor souls need “assistance and patience” to victimize more people.