On the corner of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-third Street, Patriot Drummer Mike and Magashred Steve were finishing a two-man rendition of “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” by Twisted Sister. Mike played a snare drum and wore a tricorne hat; Steve played an electric guitar and wore a red “Make America Great Again” hat, signed by the man himself. They took a break and consulted a laminated set list: “Stayin’ Alive,” “Rawhide,” “Folsom Prison Blues” rewritten as “J6 Prison Blues,” and a few Civil War anthems. They couldn’t remember which were Union songs and which were Confederate songs, but they were pretty sure that their list included some of each. “Gotta cover the bases, I guess,” Mike said.
It was a sunny afternoon in midtown, and a sellout crowd was lined up for a Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden. A Chevy truck drove by, flying a “Take America Back” flag and playing “Y.M.C.A.”; a vender was selling twenty-dollar T-shirts that read “You Missed Bitches,” with a drawing of Trump giving his would-be assassins the middle finger. I stood in line next to Pat Daley, Robert Cerepak, and Scott Wachs, teammates on a men’s-league hockey team called the Orcas. “They are alpha predators,” Wachs explained. “They work together, they’re innovative, they support one another.” He was a TV agent at William Morris Endeavor for seventeen years, and he worked with Trump’s production company on “The Apprentice.” “He’s been prosecuted, he’s been persecuted, they’ve done everything to destroy him,” Wachs continued. “He has this Christ-like halo to him. People really, really love him.” I asked him whether he worried about any of Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies—asking Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn the state’s 2020 electoral results, encouraging protesters to go to the Capitol on January 6th—and what he thought about Trump’s opponents accusing him of being a fascist. “I think it’s all speculation,” he said. “After a while,” he continued, “it reeks of desperation.”
Make Elections Safe Again, Save America, Build Israel Great Again, Brown Americans for Trump. “Dream Big Again!” a huge screen on the exterior of the Garden read, displaying an image of a Godzilla-sized Trump bestriding the Manhattan skyline. A performer called Crackhead Barney was on the scene, wearing a blond fright wig and filming confrontational interviews for her TikTok. “Kamala Harris is an insane warmonger,” an activist named Caleb Maupin said, into a bullhorn. “Kamala Harris is a product of George Soros and the U.S. regime-change apparatus.” He was standing in front of a banner that read “Only Peace Can Make America Great Again,” over a photo of Donald Trump shaking hands with Kim Jong Un. The Naked Cowboy walked by, his guitar covered in Trump stickers, and hardly anyone noticed.
We got in just in time to see Rudy Giuliani take the stage. He began by reminding us that, when he was mayor of New York, the Yankees won the World Series four times. (Now that’s leadership.) “What the heck does Adams know about baseball?” he said. “And de Blasio is so stupid, he doesn’t know about anything.” He referred to the train accident in East Palestine, Ohio (or, as he put it, “New Palestine, when they had their subway derailment”). He invoked September 11th, and October 7th, and God (“What’s happened to God? We don’t pray to Him anymore? We’re not allowed to?”). He revisited the 2020 election, which he’d contested so vigorously that he lost his New York state law license (“I’m not gonna do conspiracy, and I’m not not gonna do conspiracy”). His main point was that, by daring to speak here, “in the middle of midtown Manhattan,” Donald Trump was being very brave: “This is where a Republican’s not supposed to come, which is why Donald Trump came here. There’s no place in America the President shouldn’t be able to come!”
There were red, white, and blue accent lights fanned out across the ceiling, and retired Knicks and Rangers jerseys in the rafters, and a banner commemorating Harry Styles for selling out the Garden fifteen nights in a row. There was a screen that read “VOTE EARLY!,” and another that read “11.5.24,” and another that read “NEW YORK IS TRUMP COUNTRY”; “Trump” was above “country,” and several times bigger. The speakers stood at a lectern festooned with the words “Trump Will Fix It,” and each offered a slightly different vision of “it.” For the former Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, it was “wokeism and transgenderism, climate-ism, COVIDism”; for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., it was Big Pharma and chronic disease; for Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, it was a “European-style Marxist borderless utopia”; for Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative, it was the war machine. “We’re not just gonna make America great again—we’re gonna make the world great,” Donald Trump, Jr., said. “We’re gonna fix it all.”
“I don’t follow the polls, I don’t follow the pundits—but I follow the energy, and this does not feel like second-place energy,” Ramaswamy said. “I’ve got a message for Kamala Harris tonight—we’re feeling the joy in New York City.” He wasn’t lying. The vibes were strong. Most speakers, at one point or another, got standing ovations. The crowd kept breaking into spontaneous chants of “U.S.A.” and “We love you”; Dr. Phil, the daytime-TV therapist, was there to assure America that Donald Trump was not a bully, and he was interrupted several times by rhythmic chants of “Doc-tor Phil!” But it only took seconds for the joy to sublimate into rage. “Fire that bitch!” a woman near me screamed, when Harris’s name was mentioned. “Tampon Tim,” the crowd chanted, when J. D. Vance name-checked his opposing Vice-Presidential candidate, Tim Walz. The comedian Tony Hinchcliffe told a joke—“There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico”—that seemed to elicit both whoops and groans. Maybe the lustiest cheer of the night was “Send them back!”—a call for mass deportations.
“Usually, when I’m in Madison Square Garden, I’m body-slamming giants, I’m winning world heavyweight titles, and I’m cracking people over the heads with steel chairs,” the retired pro wrestler Hulk Hogan growled. “But today, Trumpamaniacs, the energy in here is something like I’ve never felt.” He paused to glance down at a page. (Apparently, Hulk Hogan speaks from paper notes.) “You know something, Trumpamaniacs? I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here,” he continued. “The only thing I see in here are a bunch of hardworking men and women that are real Americans.”
On February 20, 1939, the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi group based in New York, held a rally at Madison Square Garden. They billed it as a “mass demonstration for true Americanism”; the backdrop behind the stage was decorated with American flags, swastikas, and a floor-to-ceiling portrait of George Washington. “On Day One, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history,” Trump said on Sunday night, glowering and gripping the podium, after he finally took the stage, more than two hours late. “I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail. We’re gonna kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.”
Trump’s 2024 rally wasn’t a reënactment of the 1939 rally. History doesn’t repeat. But the ongoing debate over whether Trump is a fascist is not mere hysteria; when a nativist demagogue talks about an “enemy within” and foreigners “poisoning the blood of our country,” and when his campaign’s closing argument is an increasingly apocalyptic warning about an immigrant “invasion,” it would be strange if no one drew the comparison. For his near-decade on the political stage, Trump has made a fetish of plausible deniability. Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He urged the mob on January 6th to “show strength” and “take our country back,” but only “peacefully and patriotically.” He doesn’t want to be a dictator, except on Day One. The Madison Square Garden rally wasn’t an authoritarian rally; it was a mass demonstration for Americanism.
