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TRUMP’S MOST UNSETTLING SPECTACLE YET  
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Sidney Blumenthal
October 18, 2024
The Guardian
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_ Trump’s planned rally at Madison Square Garden will be the
ultimate act of ego and the climax of his Hitlerian rhetoric _

‘Trump’s climactic rally will not be in the spirit of any past
presidential event ever held there.’ , Scott Olson/Getty Images

 

For the apotheosis of his entire “poisoning of the blood”
campaign, Donald Trump
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spectacular extravaganza in Madison Square Garden on 27 October, a
week before the election. When JD Vance sings Trump’s fulsome
praises to introduce him, his ominous tribute will not inspire
comparison to the night in the Garden of 19 May 1962, when Marilyn
Monroe sang Happy Birthday, Mr President to John F Kennedy.

Trump’s climactic rally will not be in the spirit of any past
presidential event ever held there. His gathering for the great racist
replacement theory will be the culmination of his spiraling descent
since the Charlottesville rally in 2017 when neo-Nazis chanted,
“Jews will not replace us.” “Fine people on both sides,” Trump
said then. Now, at his night at the Garden, Trump will revive the
memory of the infamous American Nazi mass rally held there on 20
February 1939 through his reflected Hitlerian rhetoric.

In the last week, Trump has pledged to deploy the military against
“the enemy within”, domestic opponents he claims are worse than
foreign adversaries – those Hitler called “_Feind des Volkes_”,
or “enemy of the people”. Trump has threatened to destroy CBS, ABC
and the New York Times. About ABC, after it conducted the debate in
which he performed disastrously, he called
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to “take away their license”. After Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes
interview, having refused his own, he tweeted
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on 10 October: “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” About the Times, he
said
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on 9 October: “Wait until you see what I’m going to do with
them.” He has singled out by name journalists for the Times and the
New Yorker as “FAKE OBAMA LOVING ‘JOURNALISTS”. At every rally
he denounces the “fake news”, a drumbeat for years, echoing
Hitler’s pejorative slur, “_die __L__ügenpresse_” – “the
lying press”.

Trump traveled on 11 October to Aurora, Colorado, where he claimed a
Venezuelan gang had seized control, “scum” and “animals” who
have “invaded and conquered” and “infected” the town, a
description dismissed as false by its Republican mayor. “We have to
clean out our country,” said Trump. His language represented the
Nazi idea of “_Rassenhygiene_” – “race cleansing” that
required purification, not an academic interest in genetics but a
program of eugenics for designating inferior races to be isolated or
eliminated.

As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “A people that fails to preserve the
purity of its racial blood thereby destroys the unity of the soul of
the nation in all its manifestations. A disintegrated national
character is the inevitable consequence of a process of disintegration
in the blood.”
The former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, retired general Mark
Milley, according to Bob Woodward in his new book War, told the
veteran journalist: “No one has ever been as dangerous to this
country as Donald Trump. Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is
the most dangerous person to this country.” Trump had stated that
for Milley’s communication with his counterparts in China on January
6 to reassure them that the US military was stable, he deserved
“DEATH” – to be executed.

On 14 October, retired general Mike Flynn – Trump’s former
national security adviser, whom he pardoned for failing to register as
a foreign agent and obstructing justice – was asked at a Christian
nationalist rally for Trump whether he would preside over military
tribunals in a second Trump term to “not only drain the swamp, but
imprison the swamp, and on a few occasions, execute the swamp”.
“Believe me,” Flynn replied
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“the gates of hell – my hell – will be unleashed.”

Trump has been inevitably drawn to the Garden, in the city that made
and unmade him. He is irreversibly entrapped in his endless neurotic
syndrome of desperately seeking approval there that he constantly
repels and success he inexorably undermines, a cycle of failure,
rejection and humiliation. He wants New York to love him unreservedly,
but his relationship with the city has been one long unrequited
romance. His true love affair has always and only been with himself.
When he does not receive the adoration he feels he deserves, he hates
New York. Then, he tries to win its love again by performing a
disgusting act, which, when he is predictably rejected, triggers his
anger once again. And, then, he engages in gestures of infantile
defiance, like holding a Nazi-esque rally. Trying to show himself
triumphant over the city, he invites its scorn once again, and again,
and again. He never comprehends that he is the cause of his continuing
narcissistic injuries.

 

Trump’s rally, through the rhyme of history, will be a rebuke to the
greatest campaign speech delivered by Franklin D Roosevelt, which,
though given 88 years ago in the Garden on 31 October 1936, rings
remarkably contemporary, a speech for “the restoration of American
democracy” and its “preservation”.

“We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you we
cannot go further without a struggle,” FDR said. “We know now that
government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by
organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been
so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are
unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.”

Three years after FDR spoke at the Garden, another rally was held
there, on 20 February 1939, under the sponsorship of the German
American Bund, raising the slogan of “America First”, to advance
the great replacement theory that Jews and other “inferior races”
were displacing white Aryans. The Nazis claimed the mantle of true
Americanism and Christian nationalism. Swastikas framed a gigantic
portrait of George Washington as the backdrop to the stage. From the
balcony hung a banner: “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian
America.” “Wake up!” shouted the Führer of the Bund, Fritz
Kuhn, “you, Aryan, Nordic and Christians, to demand that our
government be returned to the people who founded it!”
Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, the Bund’s public relations director,
declared that white supremacy was the essential basis of the nation.
“The spirit which opened the west and built our country is the
spirit of the militant white man,” he said, citing racial
segregation and immigration quotas as its xxxxxxs. “It has then
always been very much American to protect the Aryan character of this
nation.”

In 2019, a seven-minute documentary about the Nazi rally of 1939, A
Night at the Garden, was nominated for an Academy Award. To promote
it, a 30-second TV ad was produced with the tagline: “It Can Happen
Here.” The line was a reference to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It
Can’t Happen Here, about a populist demagogue defeating FDR and
imposing a fascist regime. Lewis’s wife, the famous journalist
Dorothy Thompson, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, who had
reported on the rise of Hitler, pointedly attended the Nazi rally.
“I saw an exact duplicate of it in the Berlin Sports Palast in
1931,” she wrote.

When the film distributor of A Night at the Garden sought to buy time
for a spot on Fox News, its CEO, Suzanne Scott, rejected it as “not
appropriate for our air”. After the 2020 election, during Trump’s
ramping up to the January 6 insurrection, she ordered
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that Fox News suppress factchecking his lies because it was “bad for
business”.

Now, in his announcement
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of his night at the Garden, Trump advertised a clipped version of the
replacement theory, declaring that New York was “reeling” from
“Kamala’s reckless open-border policies”, “flooding” the
city with criminal “illegal migrants”. For nearly a $1m
contribution to attend the event, the top tier, donors are promised an
“Ultra MAGA Experience”, details to follow.

Trump’s Maga rally will be the first time since the 1939 Nazi rally
that the same themes of the replacement theory will echo in the
Garden. But his closing argument is more than Nazi cosplay. He cannot
help but reveal his deepest desire to be loved and then to fling the
middle finger to the city whose unconditional admiration he has sought
since he first crossed the Queensboro Bridge.

Trump’s permanent physical move to Palm Beach after his failed coup
in 2020 has not transformed him into a contented Florida Man. To the
inveterate New Yorker, the Sunshine state is strictly for snowbirds,
God’s waiting room for shuffleboarders. Mar-a-Lago, his winter
escape, has become his unnatural embittering palace-in-exile. Florida
represents disgrace to Trump.
Trump’s emotional journey back to the White House must travel
through New York. He has nothing but contempt and indifference for
Washington. He despises policy, flaunts his ignorance and detests
anyone who has ever tried to temper him, from four-star generals to
Republican congressional leaders. He wants the pomp without the
circumstance. January 6 played out Trump’s true view of the capital.

Trump plots his night at the Garden as the climax of his comeback
tour. He may have been president, but never top of the heap. Roy Cohn
could tell him how to skirt the law and ingratiate himself with the
mob, but Cohn was not a Virgil to guide his protege to respectability.
Trump’s lowlife publicity antics, tutored by Cohn, made him into one
of the revolving cast of characters populating tabloid trash. The
larger the headline of the sordid story about himself, the bigger
Trump’s delusion that kitsch burnished his class. He was always
crestfallen when his frolics did not win his admission into the club.

Trump has only been truly comfortable strutting in his old New York,
conning and threatening, greasing
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the palms of the mafia, stiffing
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his contractors and workers, while trying to buy his way into society
affairs. Time and again, the city spat him out. He was ridiculed and
reviled. He went bust
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six times. He defaulted
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on the Trump Shuttle. The banks denied him loans. He had to sell his
yacht named for his daughter, The Princess. His brutish father, who
financed his wild ventures, throwing good money after bad, had to buy
chips illegally
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to momentarily float his sinking Atlantic City casino. He dumped two
wives. He allegedly sexually assaulted dozens of women. When he tried
to lowball Frank Sinatra, an idol, Ol’ Blue Eyes told
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him, “Go fuck yourself.”

After Trump had plunged in what seemed to be his final bankruptcy, he
was rescued by a TV producer, Mark Burnett, who created the reality TV
show The Apprentice, which depicted Trump as a business genius
reigning over the Manhattan skyline. The sheer fiction was the veneer
that enabled his grubby lucrative product placement side deals. His
motive for running for president was a branding scam gone haywire.

Now, he has returned to the city on his road to redemption. Yet, so
far, he has been held accountable for his vast crimes only in New
York. He has been found liable for defamation and sexual assault and
termed an adjudicated rapist by the judge in the E Jean Carroll case,
and ordered to pay $83.3m in damages plus continuing interest; found
liable of widespread financial fraud and ordered to pay $364m for
ill-gotten gains plus continuing interest; and convicted of 34 felony
counts of financial fraud for hush-money payments, to a porn star and
Playboy model with whom he had affairs, in order to affect the outcome
of the 2016 election.

Once again, he intends to prove himself in the city that never sleeps,
the city that will give him another shot at murdering someone on Fifth
Avenue and getting away with it. A star is reborn.

_These little town blues__ __are __melt__ing away_
_I’m gonna make a brand-new start of it__ in old New York_
_And if I can make it there, __I’m gonna make it anywhere_
_It’s up to you, New York, New York_

Trump now says
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that if he loses he will blame the unappreciative Jews – he hasn’t
been “treated right” by the Jews and their support for Democrats
is a “curse”. But Trump, who has picked up a few Yiddish words,
uses them unconsciously like a native New Yorker. On 2 January 2021,
he displayed his proficiency in his notorious telephone call with the
Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he sought to
intimidate him into committing election fraud to switch the state’s
voting results.

“So look,” said Trump. “All I want to do is this. I just want to
find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”

Raffensperger resisted Trump’s strong-arming, the Georgia outcome
stood, and four days later Trump incited the assault on the Capitol in
a last-ditch effort to thwart the certification of the election:
“Hang Mike Pence!” Trump has since been indicted in Georgia for
election fraud, a case in legal purgatory until after the 2024
election.

Twice, during his call with Raffensperger, Trump derided the
Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who refused to be complicit in
Trump’s scheme, by calling
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him a “schmuck”. Perhaps the word was lost on Trump’s listeners.
According to Leo Rosten’s The Joy of Yiddish, it carries several
meanings, including “penis” and “a dope, a jerk, a boob, a
clumsy bumbling fellow”. Rosten wrote that “few impolite words
express comparable contempt”.

Now, New Yorkers can only wonder, what kind of schmuck holds a
Nazi-esque rally in Madison Square Garden?

Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton,
has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of
Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man
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Wrestling With His Angel
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and All the Powers of Earth
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He is a Guardian US columnist

* Trump
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* Hitler
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