At Madison Square Garden, MAGA is getting ready to drop another choice – the Twin Cities

On Sunday at Madison Square Garden, Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again Lollapalooza show opened with an iconic scene from the 1970 biopic Patton on the jumbotron. Waving in front of a giant American flag, George C. Scott, who plays the legendary World War II general, growled at the Nazis: “We’re not just going to shoot the bastards. We’re going to cut out their living entrails and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.” While I thought it was nice to hear the anti-Adolf Hitler rhetoric at a Trump rally, the belligerent talk of total war was irritating in the context of a campaign focused on defeating domestic enemies.

The event, which featured nearly the entirety of MAGA’s lineup on a six-hour-plus bill, kicked off with a set by Texas comedian and podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe. His sheer racism surprised me a bit, given that the Trump campaign usually tries to serve up its bigotry with a veneer of plausible deniability. “These Hispanics also like to have children,” he said. “There is no pulling out, they don’t do that, they go inside, just like in our country.” He continued, “I don’t know if you know this, but right now there is a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” Then he made a rant about black people cutting up watermelons on Halloween.

It was one of the ugliest Trump rallies I can recall, and that’s saying something. Speaker Grant Cardone, a businessman and prominent Scientologist, said of Trump’s election opponents, “we need to kill these other people” and mentioned the “pimps” of Kamala Harris. David Rehm, said to be Trump’s childhood friend, held up a crucifix and called Harris the “Antichrist.” (He then announced he was running for mayor.) Radio host Sid Rosenberg said the Democrats were a “bunch of degenerates,” delivering an expletive. Trump once again called the Democrats “the enemy from within.” The saturated red lights of the stadium and the frequent use of screeching heavy metal music created the feeling of a hellish carnival, like watching pro wrestling in hell.

I doubt this event helped Trump get many votes. Despite Vivek Ramaswamy’s stage fancies, New York is not a swing state. Hinchcliffe’s grudges against a key voting bloc proved instrumental in Harris’ campaign, prompting Puerto Rican artists, including megastar Bad Bunny, to endorse her.

But the rally still pursued several goals. Trump, who has longed to be accepted by the Manhattan elite, who saw him as a joke, must have found the respect in Madison Square Garden deeply needed. “The King of New York is back to reclaim the city he built,” Donald Trump Jr. shouted. Besides stroking his ego, Sunday’s display of dominance in one of America’s bluest seats seemed designed to create a sense of inevitability around the Republican. restoration. “The madness has to stop, and the fact that we can put Madison Square Garden in the heart of New York shows me that the spirit of the American people is there,” Trump Jr. said.

For much of the event, there was a sense that Trump followers would reject a Harris victory, but Tucker Carlson made it clear in his manic giddy speech. It was a deeply dishonest act that nonetheless contained an essential truth about the nature of Trump’s connections to his base. “He set us free in the deepest and truest sense,” Carlson said. “And the liberation he brought us is liberation from the obligation to tell lies. Donald Trump has made it possible for all of us to speak the truth about the world around us.”

It is absurd and right at the same time. Neither Trump nor Carlson is, of course, interested in truth in the empirical sense. But Carlson is right that Trump has allowed him to speak the bitter truths of his heart. Trump has lifted the taboos that once prevented an ambitious conservative executive like Carlson from embracing Holocaust denial, as he did last month. He allowed him to dismiss the idea that there was a rebellion on January 6, an idea Carlson found ridiculous on Sunday. And most importantly, Trump has given Carlson and the rest of his followers permission to dismiss the notion that he might justifiably lose, given how much love there is for him even in supposedly hostile Manhattan territory.

After mocking Harris as a “low-intelligence ex-California prosecutor in Samoa Malaysia,” Carlson argued that if she was declared the winner, it should be seen as a big lie. “I find it very hard to believe that the rest of us are going to say, ‘You know what, Joe Scarborough, you’re right,'” he said, sarcastically addressing the MSNBC host. “You’re right, she honestly won because she’s just so impressive. I don’t think so. And for me it is liberation. It is the freedom to speak what is self-evidently true, as a free man and not a slave.”

The message that the MAGA caravan brought to Madison Square Garden was that their movement would soon be completely unrestricted. “The United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon no longer be an occupied country,” Trump said, before promising “the largest deportation program in American history.” Set in the heart of a city with more immigrants than any other, it felt like an inside-out promise of the coming occupation. According to Trump, election day will be “liberation day”. Sunday was a glimpse of what his version of being fired means.

Michelle Goldberg writes a column for the New York Times.

Originally published: October 28, 2024 at 4:45 PM CDT