Donald Trump, perhaps gunning for a Nixonian repeat, plans to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden just nine days before Election Day.
It worked for Richard Nixon in 1968. A week after he held his Halloween rally at the famed venue he won the presidential election.
“We just rented Madison Square Garden,” Trump confirmed Wednesday at a rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, after the New York Post first reported it. "We're gonna make a play, we’re gonna make a play for New York. Hasn’t been done in a long time.”
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Trump's planned Oct. 27 rally at the Garden, which seats nearly 20,000, has critics drawing parallels to the most infamous political event held there: the pro-Nazi rally of 1939, when Hitler sympathizers railed against "job taking Jewish immigrants."
At his own campaign rallies, Trump has decried migrants who he says are “destroying the blood of our country" and “taking your jobs.”
In Scranton, the hometown of President Joe Biden, even as he said he was making a play to win over Empire State voters, Trump trashed New York City and its immigrant population. He alleged migrants have “taken over” Madison and Fifth Avenues that “they’ve taken over the parks. The kids can’t play Little League.”
Trump hinted at his New York plan earlier this year in an interview on Fox News. "People that would have never voted for me because I’m a Republican… I think they’re going to vote for me. So I think we’re going to give New York a heavy shot.”
But what's heavier are the odds against Trump coming anywhere close to winning New York’s 28 electoral votes. He lost the Empire State by nearly two million votes in 2020, an even wider margin than his 2016 loss to the state’s former senator, Hillary Clinton. The Cook Political Report rates New York as one of the safest Democratic states in the country.
New York isn’t the only place where Trump is making a longshot campaign stop. The former president is set to rally in Coachella this weekend in triple-digit temperatures; no Republican presidential candidate has won California in almost three decades.
But there are other reasons for Trump to visit the California desert. The area is rife with rich Republican donors—and besides the practical benefits of their support, rubbing shoulders with the wealthy and powerful is one of the former president’s favorite pastimes. But his dream of winning blue states doesn't end there, and it has something to do with Kamala Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“We’re making a play for New Jersey. We’re making a play for Virginia,” Trump said Wednesday. “We’re making a play for New York. New Mexico, Minnesota, where this lunatic comes from I’m doing—you know why I’m doing well in Minnesota? Because he’s running.”
