It doesn’t matter if you want to call it a hate rally or a Nazi rally or an authoritarian Lollapalooza. Doesn’t matter if you want to call the speakers unhinged or ill-mannered or fascistic. I don’t care what you call the Trumpian spectacle that unfolded at Madison Square Garden this weekend.
In this, the blessedly final week of the 2024 presidential campaign, that rally was only the latest s--t stain in a decade-long political career rooted in scapegoating and fear-mongering. After a decade of stoking fear and hatred, we have now reached Peak MAGA.
What started in the tacky atrium of Trump Tower with a rant about Spanish-speaking immigrants ends with a lame joke by a s--tty comic about Spanish-speaking Americans, with another speaker calling Donald Trump’s political opponent “the antichrist.” We’re ten years into the Trump Era, a decade marked by racist scandal upon sex scandal upon financial scandal upon criminal scandal.
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To say that we’re numb to it all would be an understatement. Another woman came forward last week to allege sexual abuse by Trump (with a cameo by Jeffrey Epstein) this week and it barely got covered. She is the 27th woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault. Nobody cared. We expect these Trump scandals. Worse, too many Americans crave them.
When he or his surrogates attack Puerto Ricans or Muslims or Black people or legal Haitian immigrants or people from “s--thole countries;” when Trump sits down for dinner with a Holocaust denier; when he refuses to disavow David Duke’s support or when he elevates the bats--t and antisemitic QAnon movement; when he attacks trans people; when he spends day after day spreading lie after lie, he scrapes away, layer by layer, whatever used to pass for American civility until we are left here, a raw and unnerved people looking at our fellow Americans with suspicion and fear.
He did this.
In 2015, Trump’s initial candidacy was dismissed as the vanity project of a reality television star. That wasn’t an incorrect assessment, but it miscalculated Americans’ appetite for inauthenticity and vulgarity. It wasn’t that Trump was a reality star whose schtick translated to real America, it’s that real America turned out to be more of a reality show than we were willing to admit. The cruelty, interpersonal conflicts, and erratic personalities that fuel our addiction to bad TV has now become central to an entire half of our electorate.
The Madison Square Rally rally this week wasn’t an outlier, only a very special episode of The Trump Show.
It’s been ten f---ing years of this. If, ten years ago, as Trump mulled his candidacy, somebody had sat down to write a satire of what a successful Trump campaign would look like, it would have looked very much like the coverage of the actual event. Consider the following paragraph from the actual New York Times’ coverage: “David Rem, a childhood friend of Mr. Trump, called Ms. Harris ‘the devil.’ Grant Cardone, a businessman, declared that the sitting Vice President had ‘pimp handlers.’ Sid Rosenberg denounced Hillary Clinton as a ‘sick son of a bitch’ for linking the Trump rally and a pro-Nazi event at the same arena decades ago.”
That’s not even mentioning the fact that Hulk Hogan tried, and for a time failed, to rip off his shirt, the only Black speaker walking out to the song Dixie, and that the rally started with Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage.
I’m sorry, but that doesn’t read like a bad episode of Veep? (Actually, that sounds like an awesome episode of Veep but only because Veep is making fun of f---ing idiocy!)
I don’t know how many felony convictions the collected speakers had between them, but it was a lot. Why? Because sometimes the crooks win. Sometimes, the worst among us convince the rest of us suckers and losers that we’d be better off with them running the show. When people compare Trumpism to Nazism, it isn’t because we anybody thinks Trump is “literal Hitler” as his supporters like to say.
It’s because Trumpism displays the same hatred and buffoonery of the early Nazis with their bloviating, self-aggrandizing speeches and their cadre of big, dumb goons swinging fists in the streets. It’s because we recognize the same ugly impulses that compelled what was, at first, a minority of Germans to sacrifice their character and morality. It’s because we recognize the fear that caused good Germans to keep their mouths shut and the cold calculations that made powerful German industrialists look the other way at Nazi abuses, and which led them to ultimately collaborate.
It’s because we know that dehumanizing language about people eventually leads to the state dehumanizing people. Can’t happen here? May I refer to you to Trump’s plan to round up millions of people from their homes and put them in detention camps? May I refer you to the fact that a recent poll found that half of all Americans, including a quarter of Democrats, support such a mass deportation? What does that look like, exactly, when the National Guard goes house-to-house in neighborhoods across the country? I’ll tell you what it looks like. It looks like Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.
When I sat down to write this column, I thought I’d try to keep it light. But you know what? This s--t is scary. It’s scary because we’re a week away from the close of this election, but I don’t think there’s an American out there who believes that this election will end quietly.
Drop-off ballot boxes are already exploding. Poll workers are being attacked. After one voter was told she couldn’t wear her MAGA gear into the polling station, she tore off her shirt, pushed the poll worker, and told the worker to “suck her c---.” JD Vance later tweeted about the woman, “what a patriot.”
That’s where we are. That’s who we’ve become over the last ten years. So yeah, it doesn’t matter to me what you want to call Trump’s rally or Trump’s movement. The name doesn’t matter so much as the human rot that feeds it. For decades, we’ve been wondering how much more divisive American politics can become.
Now we know. Hopefully next week’s election pulls us back from the brink. But what if it doesn’t? What if Trump wins? Conversely, what if he loses? What feels like the last straw often turns out to be just another straw. How many more straws before he’s broken America’s back?
