Talk about retail politics. Even if President Trump’s visit to the bodega made famous by Jose Alba is meant to distract from his criminal trial downtown, it’s a shrewd piece of political theater to put the spotlight on District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s misguided prosecutorial priorities. Mr. Bragg, after all, sought in 2022 to pin a murder rap on Mr. Alba after the bodega clerk, cornered by an ex-con, killed his tormentor in self-defense. 

While Mr. Trump dodged questions about his trial on charges of what Mr. Bragg calls white collar crime — falsifying business records — the candidate had critical words for the district attorney, the New York Post reported. “Alvin Bragg does nothing, he goes after guys like Trump who did nothing wrong,” he said, adding that “there are hundreds of murderers all over the city, they know who they are, and they don’t pick them up. They go after Trump.”

The bodega visit is a reminder of the outrage Mr. Bragg sparked when, in a troubling irony, the prosecutor wheeled on Mr. Alba, whom many New Yorkers saw as the victim, not the perpetrator, of a crime. It was all the more inapt at a time when violent crime was raging across the city and Mr. Bragg was adopting more lenient policies towards the perpetrators, and appeared to have less concern for the police or for victims like Mr. Alba.

Mr. Bragg threw the book at Mr. Alba, with a  second-degree murder charge. The clerk was at first saddled, too, with a $250,000 bail requirement in a state where liberals had largely eliminated cash bail for most crimes in a misguided attempt at criminal justice reform. Mr. Alba even cooled his heels in jail on Rikers Island for six days. Mr. Bragg eventually conceded he couldn’t prove the bodega clerk “was not justified in his use of deadly physical force.”

At the time, these columns detected in Mr. Bragg’s motion to drop the case a “reluctance to abandon the prosecution of a law-abiding citizen who had been assaulted by a violent ex-convict.” Yet if anyone anticipated Mr. Bragg might have been chastened by his overreach in Mr. Alba’s case, such hopes were not warranted, as he has persisted in his soft-on-crime approach to law enforcement — except, one might say, with regard to Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump, for his part, pledged during the bodega visit to “straighten New York out,” the Post reported, and even threw in a pitch for the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Told by the store’s owner that he was “grappling with rampant crime,” as the Post put it, a reportedly startled Mr. Trump replied “you should be allowed to have a gun. If you had a gun, you’d never get robbed,” and “that would be the end of it.”

“You have to stop crime and we’re going to let the police do their job,” Mr. Trump added on Tuesday. “We’re making a big play” for New York, the GOP front-runner added. “I love this city and it’s gotten so bad in the last three years, four years, and we’re going to straighten New York out.” Say what you will about Mr. Trump, his impromptu bodega drop-in is a reminder that if things don’t go his way in November, there’s a mayoral election in 2025.