The unhinged, often racist madness at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally is a preview of what his win on Election Day would unleash. Yet the Democratic Party has continuously refused to wage a substantive campaign to defeat him.
Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on Sunday evening at Madison Square Garden in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
The Donald Trump campaign just can’t help itself. Throughout this election season, as an unpopular and hapless Democratic Party threatened to hand him a victory virtually by default, we’ve gotten hints that a more disciplined, politically smarter Trump might show up — only for the candidate and his allies to sabotage themselves with off-putting, oddball behavior in a fit of overconfidence.
It’s too early to say if a piece of arrogance-driven self-sabotage is what the campaign’s incendiary, racist rally at Madison Square Garden last night is going to end up being. But it certainly fits the bill.
Trump and the GOP, who are supremely confident of a big victory and already measuring the White House drapes, decided to use the major, widely covered Manhattan rally a week before voting as an opportunity to remind the country of everything people find alienating and scary about the candidate and his movement. Trump’s reported intention to strike a mood of conciliation and unity after his near death this summer — an intention that lasted roughly a single day — is long gone, as speaker after speaker got up on stage to say unhinged, often vile things, including the candidate himself.
Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, is “the devil,” “the antichrist,” and “on the side of the terrorists,” and was trying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian low-IQ former California prosecutor” president whose “pimp handlers will destroy our country.” Hillary Clinton is “some sick bastard” and a “sick son of a bitch,” and “the whole fucking [Democratic] party, a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew haters.”
“America is for Americans and Americans only,” said Trump adviser Stephen Miller, in a night that saw billionaire Elon Musk, an immigrant who once worked illegally in the country, attend and speak from the stage. Trump himself once more talked about the “enemy within” — specifically, a “massive, crooked, malicious leftist machine that’s running the Democrat party” — in the course of another marathon-length speech that rallygoers left midway through.
But the most potentially politically damaging moment came courtesy of stand-up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who launched into a parade of deliberately offensive jokes about blacks, Jews, Palestinians, Latinos, and, most notably, Puerto Rico, which he joked was a “floating island of garbage” — a line that, to Hinchcliffe’s palpable surprise, was not received well even by the thousands of pro-Trump attendees, despite him remarking the GOP is “the party with a good sense of humor.”
The hateful, venomous nature of Trump’s political project isn’t going to be exorcized through scolding and finger-wagging but by thorough and conclusive political defeat.
The political stupidity of the line, and of asking Hinchcliffe to open the rally in the first place, soon became clear: the Trump campaign distanced itself from him; Hinchcliffe retreated and said he was just a comedian making jokes; Puerto Rican megastars Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin threw their weight behind the Harris campaign; and a series of Republican officials quickly came forward to denounce the joke.
The rally is an ominous preview of the kind of impact a potential Trump win next week may have not just on the US political landscape but on the culture more broadly. Though Trump’s 2016 run was controversial for many good reasons, even that was a far cry from the joyless, ugly campaign he has run this year: one devoid of any serious policy solutions to the many, many crises plaguing the country and that has instead been consumed with dark promises of revenge, punishment, and cruelty toward a panoply of groups disliked by his base — immigrants above all, both documented and undocumented alike.
If this is what Trump and the people around him are saying when they only think they’re going to win, you can imagine what they’ll feel encouraged to say and do if they actually do, let alone the kind of nastiness that will ripple throughout society. Trump’s comparatively moderate 2016 campaign already led to a spike in open racism and violence in the country. As a Holocaust survivor told 60 Minutes earlier this year, people can become shockingly vicious “as soon as permission is given from higher-ups” or “even a hint of permission that it’s okay to attack this group or exclude this group or shame that group.”
The trouble is, this might be true, but people have been pointing this out for the last year, if not the last eight years straight. Yet Trump — a deeply unpopular figure who the majority of the country thinks is dishonest, mean-spirited, and embarrassing — is still a finger away from the presidency for the third time. The hateful, venomous nature of Trump’s political project isn’t going to be exorcized through scolding and finger-wagging but by thorough and conclusive political defeat, and having an alternative political project firmly established in the public’s mind as an actual, viable way forward for the country out of the many things that currently ail it.
That brings us to the problem. Both of these things are, right now, largely out of our hands and exclusively up to a hapless, incompetent, and corporate-dominated Democratic Party, one that has chosen a risky, already once-failed campaign strategy for this election, was at one point willing to lose disastrously to Trump and Republicans out of loyalty to its frail and unfit leader, and has stubbornly refused, despite nearly a year of efforts by activists, to stop facilitating the nihilistic campaign of mass murder that has divided its supporters and imperiled its election chances.
After a brief window where the US political landscape seemed to have shifted and opened up to new possibilities, it seems we’re back in the wretched box we were trapped in for decades: where the American public’s only choices are one party drifting further and further into a morass of far-right insanity and the other offering to do a milder version of some of those same flagship right-wing policies garnished with a handful of progressive ones. With eight days until voting, it’s not a place anyone in their right mind wants to be in.