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DONALD TRUMP’S RACIST NYC RALLY WAS VILE. IT WAS ALSO POLITICAL
SUICIDE.  
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David Rothkopf
October 28, 2024
The Daily Beast
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_ The Madison Square Garden rally, operatic in its repulsive bigotry,
will almost certainly alienate more voters who might have voted for
Trump. _

,

 

To all those Republicans who shed crocodile tears because their
feelings were so hurt that people were calling Donald Trump
[[link removed]] a fascist:
Stop.

To all the MAGA defenders who said it was over-the-top to compare
Trump’s Madison Square Garden
[[link removed]] 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.

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.
[[link removed]], 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
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detailed and thoughtful plan for Puerto Rico
[[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]] “we need to
slaughter these other people.” Disgraced and destitute former New
York Mayor Rudy Giuliani
[[link removed]] 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
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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 [[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] “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.

_David Rothkopf (Twitter [[link removed]]) is CEO of The
Rothkopf Group [[link removed]], a media company that
produces podcasts including Deep State Radio, hosted by Rothkopf.
TRG also produces custom podcasts for clients including the United
Arab Emirates. He is also the author of many books including Running
the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the
Architects of American Power
[[link removed]], Superclass, Power,
Inc., National Insecurity, Great Questions of Tomorrow,
and Traitor: A History of Betraying America from Benedict Arnold to
Donald Trump. His daily newsletter "Need to Know" is available
at davidrothkopf.substack.com
[[link removed]]._

_THE DAILY BEAST [[link removed]] is an American
news website [[link removed]] focused on
politics, media, and pop culture. Founded in 2008, the website is
owned by IAC Inc [[link removed](company)]._

_It has been characterized as a "high-end tabloid
[[link removed]]" by Noah Shachtman
[[link removed]], the site's
editor-in-chief from 2018 to 2021. In a 2015 interview,
former editor-in-chief
[[link removed]] John Avlon
[[link removed]] described the Beast's
editorial approach: "We seek out scoops, scandals, and stories about
secret worlds; we love confronting bullies, bigots, and
hypocrites." In 2018, Avlon described the Beast's "strike zone" as
"politics, pop culture, and power". (Wikipedia
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* Donald Trump
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* Fascism
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* MSG
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* elections
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