Fascist At The Garden

NEW YORK — Donald Trump brought his fascist campaign for presidency to the heart of midtown Manhattan on Sunday, taking the stage at Madison Square Gardenand looking out over a crowd of his fanatically loyal Red Hats. 

With nine days left until the election, the campaign stop seemed like a finale ― one more grand provocation meant to show that Trump could win this thing, that he could walk into enemy territory months after a would-be assassin’s bullet pierced his ear, garnering enough supporters in this progressive, diverse city to fill up the “the world’s most famous arena.”

And that he could do it even after running one of the most racist presidential campaigns in history, and even though earlier this year a jury downtown convicted him on 34 charges of illegally influencing the 2016 election through hush money payments to a porn star, and even though earlier this year the New York state attorney general won a $450 million civil fraud judgment against him. 

Back in 2016, when he began his rise to the White House, Trump boasted that he could stand a few blocks from here, in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and “shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.” Eight years later, Trump’s observation, amidst his daily barrage of lies and exaggerations, seems more true than ever. His base of white conservative supporters are not abandoning him, no matter his latest scandal, and the polls in crucial swing states are tightening. 

The arena Sunday was packed to the brim with his adoring fans, with thousands more outside on the sidewalk watching the rally on a big screen or on their phones. At one point, so many were sitting on a construction fence that it collapsed and fell beneath their weight.

“Kamala, you’re fired!” Trump said at the beginning of his speech. “Get out!”

“That is a lot of fake news!” he said a short time later to big applause, pointing at the journalists gathered in the press section of the arena.

Then Trump pivoted to the bread-and-butter messaging of his campaign: falsely painting immigrants as inherently criminal. Kamala Harris, he said, has “resettled them into your communities to prey upon innocent American citizens. But the day I take the oath of office, the migrant invasion of our country ends and the restoration of our country begins!”

Outside the arena, a man watching the speech yelled “disgusting!” when Trump spoke about this nonexistent “invasion” of immigrants. “Send them back Donnie!” he screamed.

The former president continued: “On day one I will launch the largest deportation program in American history and get the criminals out,” he said. “I will rescue every city in town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible. The United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer. ... On Nov. 5, 2024, nine days from now, it will be Liberation Day in America.”

Throughout his speech, Trump paused so the audience could watch TV news clips about crimes committed by immigrants on the jumbotron.

“You know, we had a case in Long Island where MS-13, one of the other really bad gangs, killed two young girls, 16 years old, walking to school...” Trump said at another point, referring to a murder case in Brentwood, New York. “They knifed them, and they cut them into little pieces, and it was so painful. Perfect, perfect, young, beautiful girls were cut up into little pieces by knives and MS-13... And you know who took care of it for us? ICE. ICE. They had no problem. Kamala wants to defund ICE. We’re not defunding ICE, right? We’re not defunding ICE.”

Trump’s single-minded focus on nativism and anti-immigrant bigotry has defined what experts say is a fascistic 2024 presidential campaign. Echoing Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric, Trump and his campaign have accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the nation through “bad genes” and infectious disease. 

He has lied that undocumented immigrants commit more violent crime than U.S.-born and naturalized citizens, when the oppositeis true. He has said immigrants have turned the United States into “a garbage can for the world.” Flanked by mugshots at a Colorado rally earlier this month, Trump said Democrats had “imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world” to “prey upon innocent American citizens.” He promised, “We will not be conquered.”

Trump and Republicans across the country have also accused Democrats of “importing” immigrants to illegally vote for them — a reference to the white nationalist “Great Replacement” theory — and used the minuscule prospect of voting by noncitizens as grounds for attempting to purge thousands of U.S. citizens from voter rolls and potentially denying a Trump loss.

Trump’s answer to his migrant problem is a historic mass deportation program, carried out by an unprecedented wave of military personnel and law enforcement, complete with enormous prison camps and a constant churn of expulsions — all part of what key Trump adviser Stephen Miller has said will be “greater than any national infrastructure project” in American history.

Trump has also aimed his ire at U.S. citizens themselves, promising to end the constitutional right of automatic, “birthright” citizenship for people born in the United States if their parents are undocumented. He has also called for “remigration,” a term popularized by European neo-Nazis and right-wing nationalists to refer to the expulsion of even legal immigrants and nativized citizens who are not white — or properly “assimilated.” 

Mass deportation would only be one part of what experts worry would be an authoritarian turn under Trump. He has also pledged to erase the independence of the federal civil service, allowing widespread firings by political appointees without recourse.

Trump’s longest-serving former chief of staff described Trump as a fascist, as did the former chairman of the joint chief of staff. Former administration officials have said Trump’s “admiration for dictators like Hitler is rooted in his desire for absolute, unchecked power.” He has threatened to prosecute or punish his perceived enemies over 100 times. He has repeatedlypraised his supporters who attacked Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 — while referring to his opponents as an “enemy from within” who would cause chaos on Election Day, which he’s said could be “easily handled” by the military.

Last year, Trump, who has said he’ll be a dictator on “day one,” pledged to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country.” He recently contrasted the authoritarian Chinese President Xi Jinping: “He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist, he’s a brilliant guy, whether you like it or not” — with “evil people in our country.” 

Even before he took the stage Sunday, different speakers delivered deeply racist and alarming remarks. Right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe said Latinos “love making babies,” adding: “There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside just like they did to our country.” Hinchcliffe also called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” before making a remark about Black people who “carved watermelons” instead of pumpkins for Halloween.

Grant Cardone, a real estate investor who founded the 10x Growth Conference, made a racist remark when talking about Trump’s Democratic opponent, Harris. “Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country,” Cardone said.

David Rem, a childhood friend of Trump’s, called Harris the “anti-Christ.”

And Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, went after Harris’ mixed-race heritage. “It’s going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, ‘You know what, Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president,’” he said. Harris’ father is from Jamaica and her mother is from India.

Trump’s appearance at Madison Square Garden comes 75 years after another right-wing rally at the arena that bore some unnerving resemblances to Sunday’s MAGA rally. In 1939, some 20,000 people walked past counter-demonstrators, under police protection, inside the venue where giant American flags festooned the stage and speakers attacked the press and promised to take the country “back” from various groups. The audience then didn’t wear red hats, but many wore brown uniforms almost identical to those of Nazi storm troopers. Occasionally the entire crowd lifted up their right arms to give the fascist roman salute. The “Pro-America Rally,” organized by the German American Bund, was also a celebration of a man we now know Trump admires: Adolf Hitler. 

Daniel Marans contributed to this report.