To all those Republicans who shed crocodile tears because their feelings were so hurt that people were calling Donald Trump a fascist: Stop.
To all the MAGA defenders who said it was over-the-top to compare Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally to that held by the German-American Bund in an earlier incarnation of Madison Square Garden: Shush.
To all those who were falling once again for the bought-and-paid-for narrative that Trump somehow had the momentum going into the final week of campaign 2024: Nope.
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On Sunday at MSG, Donald Trump engineered what will be seen by political analysts and later by historians as the coup de grâce that killed forever his prospects of being president and may well have set him on a post-election course on which he finally may be held accountable for his actions.
The interminable rally concluded by an interminable, disjointed, incoherent and yet clearly vile speech by the former president, might have been touted by Trump’s son Don Jr., one of his warm-up acts, as the “King of New York returning to reclaim his crown.” But Trump was never the King of New York. (Sorry, Lara, your father-in-law did not “build” New York. Immigrants did. But we’ll get to that in a minute.)
Trump has always been loathed in New York City, especially in his former home borough of Manhattan where the vote against him was and will be dependably over 80 percent. But if he was hated before, rest assured he will be more despised after tonight.
That was clear early on when Tony Hinchcliffe, a man invited by Trump to give one of the introductory speeches—who in true MAGA fashion alleged without providing a shred of evidence that he was a comedian—offered a KKK buffet of nauseating slurs. He called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”
The “joke” was as stupid as it was repulsive because there are almost 600,000 Puerto Ricans in New York City and many more spread across regions of vital importance in the upcoming election. It also happened to come on a day when Vice President Kamala Harris announced her detailed and thoughtful plan for Puerto Rico, an island Trump wanted to trade to Denmark in exchange for Greenland.
But this loser did not stop there. He offered unfunny commentary about his view that Latinos “love making babies” and a reference to how his Black friends liked carving watermelons.
You might think that a few super-racist comments from one speaker might not warrant comments that compared the Trump rally to the Nazi meeting 85 years ago. But his comments were hardly the worst. And the racism and the hate and incitement to violence and the promise of an increasingly authoritarian state continued from the very beginning of the event to the very end.
One speaker said that Harris was managed by “pimp handlers” and said of Democrats that “we need to slaughter these other people.” Disgraced and destitute former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, as did several others, that Democrats were behind attempts to kill Donald Trump. Another speaker called Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist.”
Former Trump aide Stephen Miller, as is his habit, went directly for the Nazi playbook saying, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Tucker Carlson came out to offer more racist slurs about Harris. Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt off while declaring he saw no Nazis in the audience (thus proving that steroid abuse can not only shrivel up your junk but that it’s not really good for your eyesight either).
Elon Musk was there acting strangely and promising to slash the size of the government (except, presumably, the parts that are subsidizing his businesses).
As an aside, it is worth noting the irony of Musk appearing at a rally condemning illegal immigration when recent revelations seem to confirm that he himself was an illegal immigrant. That’s not just hypocrisy. If he lied about any aspect of his citizenship status or journey when filling out the forms required to get the Top Secret clearance that this phone pal of Vladimir Putin has, it’s a felony and could not only cause his clearances to be revoked it could be bad news for his businesses and frankly his ability to stay in the United States. No wonder he is all in for the only “politician” in America who would pardon his crimes in a heartbeat.
Trump attacked the media, and egged the crowd on to boo journalists in the crowd. He said migrants had taken over Times Square (which is nine blocks uptown from where the rally was held). He called the U.S. an occupied country which, while bad, may be better than his reference to it as a garbage can the other day. He called Harris a “low-IQ individual.” He offered so many lies that cable networks tuned him out because it was impossible to keep up with fact-checking him. He returned to old themes like the bizarre notion that Harris would reinstate the draft and start World War III.
Most importantly from the perspective of confirming his fascism he reiterated at length his assertion that his opponents were “enemies of the people.” (You know the ones against whom he promised to unleash the U.S. military.) He called them “the most sinister and corrupt forces on Earth.”
In other words the entire event, despite its marathon length and hodgepodge of z-list speakers, delivered over and over again a very focused message. The Trump campaign is about retribution and revenge. It is about the white supremacist desire to purge America of all their neighbors of different colors and beliefs. It is about Trump’s desire to seek out his enemies and punish them. And over the course of its Wagnerian length (and resonances) it singled out group after group that would be deported or punished.
From a political perspective the strategy is pure suicide. The rally will almost certainly alienate more voters who might have voted for Trump and it is hard to imagine it has earned him one single new vote. (Unless there is a Franz Liebkind somewhere who has been too busy writing “Springtime for Hitler” to have paid attention to the campaign until now.) It was a play to the base when the biggest problem Trump has in this election is breaking through his rock solid ceiling of around 47 percent of the electorate.
But worse still, unlike the Bund rally, Trump’s was not a fringe affair. It was led by a former President of the United States on behalf of very nearly half of the American people.
Its threats of authoritarianism were supported by efforts during the first Trump presidency to sidestep the rule of law and by crimes including a coup attempt we all saw with our own eyes. Its future plans for concentration camps in the U.S. and for mass deportations and the use of the military against the American people have been carefully developed, and there is a plan to put them in place.
That is why Trump’s Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden was, as it turned out, far more ominous than its predecessor. It should chill Americans to the bone. But, I expect it will do more than that. I believe it will mobilize more voters to take action on Nov. 5 to stop the 21st-century fascism of Trump and MAGA.
Trump may be thinking the rally will help him mobilize thugs to violence when he contests his loss and we should be wary of that. But he has provided on the eve of the election the best case why he must be defeated that has ever been presented. In the end, because what unfolded was so foul and so offensive and threatening to so many of us, I believe that is why we will someday conclude that for all intents and purposes Trump’s final political act occurred on the biggest stage in America’s biggest city, a couple of blocks from Broadway.
