NEW YORK – Donald Trump took his fascist campaign for president 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 to go until the election, the campaign stop seemed like a finale — another major provocation designed to show that Trump could win this thing that months after a would-be assassin’s bullet pierced his ear, he was able to enter enemy territory, amassing enough supporters in this progressive, diverse city to fill the “world’s most famous arena.”
And that he could do that even after running one of the most racist presidential campaigns in history, and even though a city jury convicted him earlier this year 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.
In 2016, as he began his rise to the White House, Trump boasted that he could stand a few blocks away, in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and “shoot someone, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s incredible.” Eight years later, amid his daily barrage of lies and exaggerations, Trump’s observation seems truer than ever. His base of white conservative supporters is not abandoning him, regardless of his latest scandal, and the polls in crucial swing states are tightening.
The arena was filled to the brim with his adoring fans on Sunday, while thousands of others watched the rally on a big screen or on their phones on the sidewalk outside. At one point, so many were sitting on a construction fence that it collapsed and fell under their weight.
“Kamala, you’re fired!” Trump said at the start of his speech. “Go away!”
“That’s a lot of fake news!” he said a short time later to loud applause, pointing to the journalists gathered in the arena’s press section.
Trump then focused on the bread-and-butter message of his campaign: falsely portraying immigrants as inherently criminal. Kamala Harris, he said, has “rehoused them in your communities to rob innocent American citizens. But on the day I take the oath of office, the invasion of migrants into our country will end and the recovery of our country will begin!”
Outside the arena, a man watching the speech shouted “disgusting!” when Trump talked about this non-existent “invasion” of immigrants. “Send them back, Donnie!” he shouted.
The former president continued: “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history and get the criminals out,” he continued. “I will save every city in the city that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these cruel and bloodthirsty criminals in jail and kick them out of our country as soon as possible. The United States is now an occupied country, but soon it will no longer be an occupied country. … On November 5, 2024, in nine days, it will be Liberation Day in America.”
During his speech, Trump paused so the audience could watch TV news clips about crimes committed by immigrants on the jumbotron.
Trump’s singular focus on nativism and anti-immigrant bigotry has defined what say experts is a fascist presidential campaign for 2024. Echoing the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler, Trump and his campaign have accused immigrants of “poison the blood‘of the nation through’bad genes“And infectious disease.
He has lied that undocumented immigrants commit more violent crimes than U.S.-born and naturalized citizens the oppositeis true. He has said that immigrants have turned the United States into “a dustbin for the world.” Flanked by mugshots at a rally in Colorado earlier this month, Trump said The Democrats had “imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the Third World” to “prey on innocent American citizens.” He promised, “We will not be overcome.”
Trump and Republicans across the country have done so, too accused Democrats “importing” immigrants to vote for them illegally – a reference to the white nationalist”Great replacementtheory — and used the minuscule prospect of non-citizen voting as a rationale for an effort to purge thousands of American citizens from the voter rolls and potentially deny a Trump loss.
Trump’s answer to his migrant problem is: a historic mass deportation programcarried out by an unprecedented wave of military personnel and law enforcement agencies, complete with massive prison camps and an ongoing cycle of deportations — all part of what top Trump adviser Stephen Miller has said will be “bigger than any national infrastructure project” in the U.S. history .
Trump has also turned his anger on the American citizens themselves, and promises to end the constitutional right to 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, referring to the deportation of even legal immigrants and nation-citizens who are not white – or properly ‘assimilated’.
Mass deportation would be just part of what experts fear could be an authoritarian turn under Trump. He has also promised to erase the independence of the federal civil service, allowing widespread firings of political appointees without recourse.
Trump’s longest-serving former chief of staff described Trump as fascist, as did the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Former government officials to 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 more than 100 times. He has repeatedlypraised are supporters who attacked Congress on January 6, 2021 – while referring to his opponents as an “enemy from within” who would cause chaos on election day, something he said could be “easily handled by the military.”
Last year, Trump, who did said he will be a dictator on “day one.” promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and radical leftist criminals who live like vermin within the borders of our country.” He recently contrasted authoritarian Chinese President Xi Jinping: “He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist, he is a brilliant guy, whether you like it or not” – with “bad people in our country.”
Even before he took the stage Sunday, several speakers made deeply racist and alarming comments. Right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe said Latinos “like to make babies,” adding, “There is no retreat. They don’t. They come in, just like they did with our country.” Hinchcliffe also called Puerto Rico a “floating garbage island in the middle of the ocean” before making a comment about black people “carving watermelons” instead of pumpkins for Halloween.
Grant Cardone, a real estate investor who founded the 10x Growth Conference, made a racist comment while speaking about Trump’s Democratic opponent, Harris. “Her and her pimps will destroy our country,” Cardone said.
David Rem, a childhood friend of Trump, called Harris the “antichrist.”
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 as impressive as California’s first low-IQ Samoan, Malaysian former prosecutor who ever been 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 apart right-wing demonstration in the arena that bore some unnerving similarities to Sunday’s MAGA rally. In 1939, some 20,000 people under police protection walked past counter-protesters in the venue where giant American flags decorated the stage and speakers attacked the press, promising to “take back” the country from various groups. The crowd did not wear red hats at the time, but many wore brown uniforms almost identical to those of the Nazi storm troopers. Every now and then the entire crowd raised their right arm 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.
