You can’t escape it. He keeps topping himself. Items today are all about Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally yesterday. With some concluding thoughts about human nature and that famous William Gibson quote.
CNN, 28 Oct 2024: Trump unveils the most extreme closing argument in modern presidential history, subtitled “His rhetoric ranks among the most flagrant demagoguery by a major figure of any Western nation since World War II”
Donald Trump anchored his bid to win a second White House term next week on searing anti-migrant fear at a rally at Madison Square Garden, doubling down on his promise for a massive deportation program on Day 1 to reverse an “immigrant invasion.”
As the ex-president’s allies defend him against Democratic claims he is a “fascist” and an authoritarian in waiting, based in part on warnings by his ex-chief of staff John Kelly, Trump on Sunday delivered a screed that may augur the most extreme presidency in modern history if he beats Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on November 5.
“The United States is an occupied country,” Trump said, as Democrats projected messages on the exterior of the storied New York City arena, reading “Trump is Unhinged” and “Trump praised Hitler.”
The huge rally was billed as the launch of the final stage of Trump’s bid to pull off one of the greatest comebacks in American political history after trying to overturn the result of the last election and leaving office in disgrace in 2021. Before he spoke, some of the ex-president’s top supporters flung race-based and vulgar rhetoric. Former congressional candidate David Rem called Harris the “antichrist” and “the devil,” while others lashed out at Hillary Clinton, “illegals” and homeless people. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
Much of Trump’s speech brimmed with falsehoods and exaggerations….
There is a certain portion of the population that eats this up.
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NY Times, 27 Oct 2024: Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism, subtitled “The inflammatory rally was a capstone for an increasingly aggrieved campaign for Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has grown darker and more menacing.”
Donald J. Trump’s closing rally at Madison Square Garden on the second to last Sunday before the election was a release of rage at a political and legal system that impeached, indicted and convicted him, a vivid and at times racist display of the dark energy animating the MAGA movement.
A comic kicked off the rally by dismissing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” then mocked Hispanics as failing to use birth control, Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers, and called out a Black man in the audience with a reference to watermelon.
Another speaker likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute with “pimp handlers.” A third called her “the Antichrist.” And the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked Ms. Harris — the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father — with a made-up ethnicity, saying she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”
By the time the former president himself took the stage, an event billed as delivering the closing message of his campaign, with nine days left in a tossup race, had instead become a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.
These are vile, despicable people. This is a long article; too many other examples to quote. His followers seem to be a barbarian mob.
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Heather Cox Richardson: 27 Oct 2024
I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way.
It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight.
There was never any question that this rally was going to be anything but an attempt to inflame Trump’s base. The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. About 18,000 people showed up for that “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
Like that earlier event, Trump’s rally was supposed to demonstrate power and inspire his base to violence.
Apparently in anticipation of the rally, Trump on Friday night replaced his signature blue suit and red tie with the black and gold of the neofascist Proud Boys. That extremist group was central to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and has been rebuilding to support Trump again in 2024.
With more about reactions to the event, such as
The headlines were brutal. “MAGA speakers unleash ugly rhetoric at Trump’s MSG rally,” read Axios. Politico wrote: “Trump’s New York homecoming sparks backlash over racist and vulgar remarks.” “Racist Remarks and Insults Mark Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally,” the New York Times announced. “Speakers at Trump rally make racist comments, hurl insults,” read CNN.
But the biggest sign of the damage the rally did was the frantic backpedaling from Republicans in tight elections, who distanced themselves as fast as they could from the insults against Puerto Ricans, especially. The Trump campaign itself tried to distance itself from the “floating island of garbage” quotation, only to be met with comments pointing out that Hinchcliffe’s set had been vetted and uploaded to the teleprompters.
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And this perspective.
Slate, Scaachi Koul, 28 Oct 2024: In 2016 I thought I might learn something from going to a Trump rally. In 2024 I’ve realized I already know too much.
The last time I attended a Donald Trump rally was in 2016, right after he won the election, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. This was back when readers and journalists alike were trying to make sense of what a Trump presidency would look like, hoping that his perfervid crowd could clarify the chilling truth we already knew lay within: It was going to be bad.
In Hershey, I remember the feeling like someone was dribbling ice water down my back: This was a crowd gleeful about the harm that could befall me and my friends. They weren’t shy, and there was no dog whistle needed. I was in a sea of people who were proud of their ideological deformities.
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JD Vance’s response to all this is, What’s the problem?
JMG, 28 Oct 2024: Vance: It’s Stupid That You Can’t Even Tell Racist Jokes
My response: sure you can tell them. And the rest of us will judge you for doing so.
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How to understand all this? I’ve said much of this before. There is a spectrum of human nature, whose base evolved over millions of years when the species lived in tribes on the African Savannah. Tribal mentality entailed working in groups to accomplish things individuals could not, and this social connectivity may have been the greatest single advance in human evolution (rather than tools). As the tribes grew and expanded around the planet, and tribes necessarily came into contact with each other, and some of them learned (or evolved) elements of social altruism: ideas of trade, of trust, of mutual gain, of nonzero sum games. And so over time humanity has built a global culture.
But not everyone did. There is still a large portion of the human population that thinks tribally: us against everyone else; all those ‘others’ are dirty foreigners who should be demonized and expelled. And this is what we saw in Trump’s MSG rally.
It’s like William Gibson’s famous quote: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”. He was referring to technology. But it’s also true in terms of human nature. As human nature has evolved to allow the species to thrive on a planetary scale, human intuitive senses of morality have shifted. Among some. But not among everyone.
