When Donald Trump announced that he would hold late-stage rallies in the blue states such as New York and California the reactions by the mainstream news media and political class were very predictable. Many mocked and laughed at the strategy, describing it as a function of his ego and narcissism and of little if any political value in an election that will likely be decided by a few thousand votes in the key battleground states. Others predicted that Trump’s rallies in blue states would be failures that reflect the impulsive and amateurish nature of his campaign. The hope peddlers and hopium sellers took Trump’s blue state rallies as another sign that Kamala Harris’ victory was probable because she is spending her resources, time and energy mobilizing persuadable voters in the battleground states. They also love to point out how Harris is holding much bigger rallies with celebrities such as Beyoncé and the crowds are much more energized as compared to Trump’s.
As it has been throughout the Age of Trump and the country’s years-long democracy crisis, the so-called conventional wisdom will likely be proven to be incorrect. With less than one week until Election Day, the polls remain basically tied.
The ultimate verdict will be issued on Election Day and beyond, but at this point, Trump’s blue state rallies — and his climactic Madison Square Garden rally in New York — may turn out to be an act of tactical and strategic genius. In military terms, Trump’s Madison Square Garden and other blue state rallies are an example of a raid. In a raid, the goal is not to hold ground for a long period of time but instead to do such things as disrupt the enemy’s logistics and communications; destroy a fixed target or area; gather information; rescue friendly personnel and perhaps even more importantly to win a psychological victory by showing the enemy that they cannot control their own territory and are vulnerable to attack and surprise. A well-executed raid may also pull enemy forces away from other positions, which in turn creates other opportunities for attack and disruption. Trump’s closest advisors include (ret.) Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who is an expert in special operations, conventional warfare, national security and intelligence.
Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally was attended by 20,000 thousand people and the many thousands outside the event who could not get inside the venue. Trump is an aspiring dictator and now unmasked, naked and increasingly bold fascist. The word “neofascist” no longer applies to Trump and his MAGA movement. His Madison Square Garden rally was an exclamation mark for this fact.
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch writes: “One week to go. The one positive thing — in a very weird way — about the final days of the 2024 campaign is that Donald Trump and his goons are not shying away from telling the American people who they really are. That was in full bloom Sunday at Madison Square Garden, at what one pro-Trump speaker — perhaps joking, perhaps not — called “a Nazi rally.” Whatever you think you would have done to stop the spread of fascism in 1939, it’s what you are doing right now.”
The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling describes Trump’s rally in the following terms: “Choosing Madison Square Garden as the New York City venue to showcase Donald Trump’s vengeful and divisive rhetoric had already evoked connections to the pro-Nazi rally held in the same location in 1939. But who Trump chose to platform at the event Sunday, and what they said, suggested that the comparisons weren’t far off.
Speaking before thousands at “The World’s Most Famous Arena,” Trump’s guests leaned into the white nationalist “great replacement theory,” donned Nazi-adjacent iconography and aggressively defined the idea of who is — and who is not — an American.””
The New York Times summarizes Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally as “a closing carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.” Also at the Times, Michelle Goldberg pithily described the event as “MAGA Lollapalooza.”
Historian Timothy Ryback, one of the world’s leading experts on the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust, said he saw troubling signs at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally:
My head is still spinning from Trump’s Madison Square Garden spectacle. It reminded me of the Hitler rallies in the Berlin Sport Palace in all their spectacle and belligerent nationalism. Trump’s call for the “death penalty for any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer” reminds me of Hitler’s similar vow, in August 1932, that if appointed chancellor, he would always place the life of a blood German over a foreigner.
The rallies that Donald Trump is currently holding in blue states, including Sunday’s MSG appearance, echo Hitler’s political stagecraft during the 1932 national elections, both presidential and legislative, which saw the staging of Nazi rallies in communist and social democratic strongholds with a two-old purpose. First, they generated headlines and frequently resulted in violent confrontations, which in turn produced martyrs for the movement. One particularly bloody encounter, in a Hamburg suburb in July 1932, even made headlines in The New York Times.
Beyond their overtly provocative intent, Trump’s blue state visits recall Hitler’s Deutschlandflüge, or Germany Flights, a first in German politics. Hitler leased a Lufthansa passenger plane and canvased the country, from the North Sea to the Bavarian alps, visiting towns and villages deep in the German heartland, regardless of political stripe, signaling his support to his constituents wherever they were. The rallies also generated revenue for the Nazi party coffers. Like Trump, Hitler knew his game.
Ryback continues, “What is most striking to my mind are Trump’s polling numbers. Hitler’s high watermark in Germany’s last free and open elections was 37%. Trump is currently polling around 50%. These are percentages that Adolf Hitler could only have dreamed of, which brings me to a point I tried to make in my new book “Takeover.” The Weimar Republic died twice. It was murdered and it committed suicide. There is no mystery to the murder. Hitler vowed to destroy democracy, and he did. What is less comprehensible is state suicide by a democratic republic, replete with the constitutional protections of free speech, due process and public referendum. For Weimar the explanations are complicated. For the United States, it is beyond comprehension that half the American electorate is willing to embrace a political leader who has already promised to be a dictator on his first day in office.”
Some of the specific lows of Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally included threats to slaughter Democratic Party voters, suggestions that Kamala Harris is a prostitute who is controlled by a pimp, white supremacist and racist “jokes” about Black people, mocking Kamala Harris’ personhood and racial identity, suggestions that she is the Antichrist and antisemitic and white supremacist conspiracy theories about nonwhite “invaders” who are poisoning the country and references to some “enemy within” that needs to be destroyed for the sake of the country’s present and future.
Eliminationist and genocidal language was also used to describe Puerto Rico (and by implication its people) as “garbage.” Trump recently made similar comments when he described how “illegal aliens” and other “undesirables” turned the United States into the world’s “garbage can.” In this context, garbage is human trash that should be destroyed.
Historian Jennifer Mercieca explained to me how the rally may impact next week’s election:
We like to look at a candidate’s campaign plan in the final stretch before an election and try to deduce how they’re thinking about their chances of winning. But campaign events can also be symbolic. I think the Madison Square Garden event is largely symbolic. Trump started his campaign in Waco, TX—not a swing state or a swing county in a safe state, but a symbolic location for the extreme right in America. While there he gave a dark speech where he claimed that he would be his supporters’ “retribution”—”In 2016, I declared ‘I am your voice.’ Today I add: ‘I am your warrior. I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Trump has promised vengeance throughout his campaign, most recently declaring that he would punish anyone who donated money to Kamala Harris’ campaign. He has threatened and intimidated business leaders, lawyers, and media organizations.
It’s hard to know how Trump sees the symbolism of an MSG campaign event — it could just be that it’s the ultimate New Yorker venue, it could be that he sees it as an act of threat and intimidation by showing strength in a traditional Democratic city, or it could be more menacing.
It could be that Trump has learned about the German-American Bund meeting held in Madison Square Garden in 1939 in which 20,000 American Nazis attended a rally wearing Nazi uniforms and giving the Hitler salute to the Nazi flag. It could be that his event in Madison Square Garden is a fascist bookend to his speech in Waco, TX. Or perhaps Trump likes media attention and has chosen a location that is sure to get a lot of coverage by the press? It’s hard to know exactly what Trump is thinking, but I don’t know of any election experts who think that Trump has a chance of winning New York City.
I’d also like to note that Kamala Harris is holding a symbolic campaign event too: she’s giving what her campaign calls her “final argument” at a rally in Washington, DC at the Ellipse—the site of Donald Trump’s January 6th address—in which he incited an insurrection against the United States. I suspect that Harris will argue that Trump is a threat to America, there in the heart of America’s symbolic center of power between the White House and the National Mall. The symbolism is quite strong on both sides of this election, and it highlights the contrast between the two candidates and two very different views of America’s future: Trump’s America is fascist; Harris’ America is democratic. It’s time for voters to decide our fate.
In an email to me last Monday, Mercieca added: “Trump’s Madison Square Garden event was full of the kind of fascist rhetoric that is now commonplace from his campaign. He has effectively terrorized his supporters into believing that their lives are at risk and that he is the only one who can save them. From the outside of Trump’s personality cult, those claims do not resonate. I don’t think Trump persuaded any undecided voters with his appeals to fear and hate.”
Trump’s Madison Square Garden event accomplished some key goals in his quest to take back the White House and then become the country’s first dictator. Trump is continuing to dominate the media environment, literally sucking the oxygen and life away from the Harris campaign. The Democrats and Harris are on the defense, as public opinion and other data show that Trump’s campaign has the momentum in the closing week of the election
By comparison, Harris and the Democrats are experiencing a softening in support from key parts of their base such as Black, Hispanic and Latino voters. Specifically, the loss in support among Latino and Black men is being acutely felt in the key battleground states.
Some observers have concluded that Trump’s hate rally and the racist and white supremacist attacks on Puerto Ricans and the greater Hispanic and Latino community could backfire, mobilizing those voters (and others) against Donald Trump and the MAGAfied Republicans.
At the Daily Beast, David Rothkopf writes:
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….
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.
I hope that Rothkopf is correct, but I remain unconvinced. Donald Trump is a hate entrepreneur who has identified his target market and is extremely adept at giving them the product (and resulting feelings and emotions) they deeply crave.
Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally again exposed the larger weaknesses of the Democratic Party and Harris campaign and their unwillingness to fully commit to the type of aggressive high-dominance leadership style that is required to confront and defeat Trump and the other American fascists and enemies of democracy.
For example, instead of holding a huge rally across the street or nearby the Democratic Party’s response was to project the words “Trump praised Hitler” on the exterior of Madison Square Garden.
Ultimately, Donald Trump is a symbol more than a man. His Madison Square Garden rally was another example of his mastery of propaganda, the spectacle and politics as entertainment. After eight years of experience, the Democrats and the responsible political class still have no answer for the showman, carnie, professional wrestling heel and cult leader Donald Trump.
Media scholar David Altheide explained to me via email how:
The media injected Donald Trump’s fear and hate into the body politic Sunday in Madison Square Garden. Emphasizing racism and the politics of fear, Trump has already won a victory by normalizing fascist fear and hate as one of “two sides”.
As a maestro of media logic, Trump continues to play the media and win. Trump is not just a presidential candidate; he is a persona and a meme after many years of celebrity, reality TV, and a President of the United States. Each performance is a mirror image. He knows that the outrageous quip is entertaining and that the visually dominant media will race to it to enhance ratings. Take the MSG extravaganza. Whether it is staging a political revival meeting at the iconic Madison Square Garden (MSG) or calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “s**t Vice President” in Pennsylvania, Trump massages media formats. There has not been so much vitriol in MSG since the German American Bund rally in 1939.
Trump got a lot of coverage about MSG several days before it even happened. With MSG, he played off several story lines: 1. The MSG rehash of his nomination was triumphant return to New York after being politically vanquished, tried and convicted. Trump even had the fallen Rudy Giuliani on hand to warn us that Hamas trains terrorists as toddlers to kill Americans; 2. MSG is a secular temple of spectacle, a place of symbolic largess that sticks to all who play there; 3. New Yorkers flocking there validated his trans-party identity as famous; 4. It was extensively covered and discussed.
Closes with this warning: Trump’s popularity and support will probably grow, the MAGA crowd will be thrilled, and a disgraced man will be pushed closer to the White House.
Beyond the obsolete metrics of normal politics such as polling and the presidential “horserace” in a country that is suffering an existential democracy crisis, Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally was a great psychological victory for MAGA and the larger antidemocracy and fascist movement. Trump showed his followers that even in blue states and other Democratic Party centers of power they are many if not legion; Trump made them feel seen and acknowledged. MAGA and American fascism are a national movement and contrary to what many liberals, progressives and centrists would like to believe is not confined to stereotypical poor white working-class people in rural red state America who are experiencing the deaths of despair from opioids and living a “Hillbilly Elegy” life as they steal coal out of the sides of mountains, pull their own teeth out with plyers and drink homemade moonshine. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, as demonstrated at Madison Square Garden last Sunday, Trump’s MAGA followers are joyful in their hatred and rage and desire for destruction and revenge against “the Left” and their other “enemies.”
Donald Trump is a native New Yorker — who has long been despised by his fellow New Yorkers. But on Sunday he was a conquering hero and champion for his MAGA people and the main event at “The World’s Most Famous Arena” Madison Square Garden. Roy Cohn would be very proud of his protégé.
