Garden Tools
The Garden was overflowing with manure this weekend as Trump and his MAGA cohort cosplayed a 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden (although even the actual Nazis wouldn’t have featured a keynote from Hulk Hogan in character). The NYT (Gift Article), usually pretty reserved when describing Trump, called the evening as A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism. In The Atlantic (Gift Article) David A. Graham sums up some of the evenings lowlights. This Is Trump’s Message. Tony Hinchcliffe was the evening’s first speaker: “‘These Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside,’ he joked. ‘Just like they did to our country.’ A minute later: ‘I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.’ It took a few more minutes before he got to the joke about Black people loving watermelons. Novel, edgy stuff—for a minstrel show in 1874.Other speakers were only somewhat better. A childhood pal of Donald Trump’s called Vice President Kamala Harris ‘the anti-Christ’ and ‘the devil.’ The radio host Sid Rosenberg called her husband, Doug Emhoff, ‘a crappy Jew.’ Tucker Carlson had a riff about Harris vying to be ‘the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.’ Stephen Miller went full blood-and-soil, declaring, ‘America is for Americans and Americans only.’ (In 1939, a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden promised ‘to restore America to the true Americans.'”) So what was the goal? This hardly expands the base. The point, it seems, is divisiveness, hate, and rage intended to stir up the base in the event of an election loss for Trump. One could argue that his MAGA MSG act made such a loss more likely. If nothing else, in a campaign built on lies, the night at the garden was a wholly honest look at what Trumpism is all about. It’s what you’d call Garden variety fascism.
+ Heather Cox Richardson on the rally and one particularly notable aside from its headlines: “But Trump perhaps gave away the game with his inflammatory language and with an aside, seemingly aimed at House speaker Johnson. ‘I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over,’ Trump said. It seems possible—probable, even—that Trump was alluding to putting in play the plan his people tried in 2020. That plan was to create enough chaos over the certification of electoral votes in the states to throw the election into the House of Representatives. There, each state delegation gets a single vote, so if the Republicans have control of more states than the Democrats, Trump could pull out a victory even if he had dramatically lost the popular vote. Since he has made virtually no effort to win votes in 2024, this seems his likely plan. But to do that, he needs at least a plausibly close election, or at least to convince his supporters that the election has been stolen from him. Tonight’s rally badly hurt that plan.”
+ Even after all the incendiary remarks from very fine people on both sides to the enemy within, last night’s jokes about Latinos marked the first time that a handful of Trump-allied candidates actually complained about his rally content. Why? Nearly a million Puerto Ricans live in swing states and other places where races are close. And many of them, from Geraldo Rivera to Bad Bunny are pissed. Bad Bunny boosts Harris as a Puerto Rico ‘joke’ backfires on Trump.
+ While the hate rally got Trump the attention he craves, the Harris campaign is focused on the two big issues: The danger Trump poses to democracy and women’s reproductive rights. In Michigan, Michelle Obama gave the best speech I’ve seen this political season. It’s worth sharing with people in your life who might still be undecided. It’s also worth sharing with all of our daughters.
