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One of the lines of argument used by Donald Trump and his supporters to attack the criminal trial that’s underway in Manhattan is that no jury in such a pro-Democratic place could possibly be fair. As jury selection was underway in the trial, which is likely to go to a jury next week, Trump’s allies studiously pored over available biographical details to suggest that the jury pool’s politics sat somewhere between Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Che Guevara.

But, of course, this is in tension with another central motivation for Trump and his allies: presenting him as remarkably popular and well-regarded. So when Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. appeared on former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast earlier this week, he presented the scale of Trump support in the city as though it was an underground resistance movement.

“When I’m in New York, the amount of people who show support is actually huge,” Trump Jr. said. “But they do it like this” — he held up his hands to illustrate — “like, it’s like a thumbs-up, like, hidden under their jacket so no one else can possibly see.”

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It is amusing that the only people Trump has seen do this are apparently people wearing jackets — presumably sport coats, given how nice the weather has been in the city in recent weeks. But it is not surprising. The 74 million votes Trump received in 2020 came heavily from big cities where lots of people live, however likely those cities were to prefer Joe Biden’s candidacy.

We can illustrate the distribution of Trump votes by looking at the total number of votes he received in each of the 3,000-plus U.S. counties. The fewest votes he received came in Loving County, Tex., where he won 60 of the 66 votes cast. The most he received in a county? His 1.1 million in Los Angeles County — good enough for just over a quarter of all votes cast.

The five boroughs of New York (five individual counties) all provided Trump with at least 67,000 votes. The fewest came in the Bronx, where he got 67,740 votes. The most came in Queens, the county where he was born, where he got nearly 213,000. Even that low total in the Bronx, though, was more votes than he got in 92 percent of U.S. counties. In Manhattan, where the trial is underway, Trump’s 85,000 votes are more than he got in 94 percent of counties. In New York City overall, the total Trump vote was larger than all but three counties: those housing L.A., Phoenix and Houston.

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In fact, Trump lost all 23 counties where he got the most votes in 2020. In those counties, he won 10.6 million votes, about 14 percent of his total. He lost the counties by an average of 18 percentage points.

Let’s use 100,000 votes as the dividing line. Trump won about three-fifths of his votes in counties where he got fewer than that number of votes; in two-thirds of those counties, he won by at least 25 points. He lost two-thirds of counties where he got more than 100,000 votes, but still got 2 out of every 5 votes he won in those places.

As we noted in December 2020, Trump got more votes in states he lost than in states he won.

So, yeah, it’s not hard to believe that there are Trump supporters in Trump Jr.’s vicinity, particularly given the likelihood that younger Trump spends more time among sympathetic people than antagonistic ones. It is somewhat hard to believe that all these guys are trying to hide their thumbs-ups in their sports coats, though. When Donald Trump visited a bodega in upper Manhattan a few weeks ago, there was a boisterous crowd there to welcome him.

In fairness, it is possible that Trump Jr.’s experience of sheepishness is skewed by his spending time in one particular part of the city: the area around Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. In the precinct that houses Trump’s former home, two-thirds of voters preferred Joe Biden.

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