On Sunday evening, high up in the rafters at Madison Square Garden, I watched thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters come alive as the former President, at long last, took the stage in what was meant to be the grand home-town finale of his nine years of campaigning for the White House. The MAGA superfans around me—most of them men—had waited patiently for nearly five hours. They had cheered at the mere mention of Trump’s name and applauded—some more enthusiastically than others—as a parade of warm-up acts slung hate speech with reckless abandon. Of course, they loved it when the ex-President savaged Kamala Harris as a “very low-I.Q. individual”; when he claimed that Harris had personally unleashed hordes of foreign criminals, mental patients, and gang members to rampage through American cities; when he said of his political opponents, “they are indeed the enemy within.”
By now, you’ve most certainly heard about the most shocking comments from the rally at the Garden: the comic who joked about Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”; the childhood friend of Trump’s who called Harris “the Antichrist,” while wielding a crucifix before the audience like some medieval Crusader; Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, Jr., promoting the white-supremacist “replacement” theory that claims Democrats want to get rid of native-born Americans and put foreign people of color in their place. When Trump’s longtime adviser and chief anti-immigration ideologue, Stephen Miller, said, “America is for Americans and Americans only,” did he know that it was a direct echo of the Ku Klux Klan’s “America for Americans” slogan? Or the Nazis’ “Germany for the Germans”? It did not seem like a question that needed to be asked—it had already been answered. I can assure you that the night was not, as Trump tried to claim a couple days later, “an absolute love fest.”
What was sickening about being there in person was watching the Trump fans around me and realizing that there was nothing shocking about it to them. The hate was the thing that they were there to cheer for; the nastier the nickname, the cruder the slur, the bigger the roar. The people around me were not threatening or particularly angry, but they were all in, it appeared, on the worst aspects of Trumpism—the cult of personality, the calculated hurling of vicious insults, the demonization of entire groups of people. “Tampon Tim” and Harris’s “pimp handlers” were not regrettable aspects of the rally, as the Trump apologists, in what remains of the Republican Party’s old establishment, still pretend. (See: Haley, Nikki.) They were the attraction. It’s also true that most people in the audience sat politely for hours, some of them munching on popcorn or texting their friends during the dull parts. Call it the banality of evil. When Trump finally came onstage, many of those sitting near me jumped up to take selfies—from our nosebleed seats, the backdrop was a sea of red hats, the tiny figure of Trump on the stage far below us, and a giant screen much closer by with the strongman slogan “Trump Will Fix It.”
And yet, afterward, I found myself oddly optimistic for a few hours at least—perhaps it’s just too hard to believe that this dark, cramped, hateful vision of America is actually shared by a majority of Americans. I had a similar sense at the end of the G.O.P. convention in Milwaukee, this summer: his Trumpified Republican Party feels too much like a religion that demands excessive suspension of disbelief from its followers.
Less than forty-eight hours later, at Harris’s one-week-out rally on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., it was the sheer size of the turnout that awed. Her campaign claimed that seventy-five thousand people had attended, far more, in any case, than the infamous Trump rally at the same spot on January 6, 2021. If nothing else, the Vice-President has proven definitively that Trump is not the only candidate who can bring together tens of thousands of like-minded people for a bunch of political speeches. The vibe in front of the White House was its own uniquely 2024 mix—part dance party, part lecture on the parlous state of democracy. The joy of the summer was gone, but there was a happy, if nervous, energy. It was such an enormous crowd—that should count for something, right? Leaving the press area at the end of the night, I stumbled over a largeish man in a black suit. It was someone dressed up as Kim Jong Un. “Enjoy the last days of democracy,” he said, as I lurched on toward the exit.
The contrasts with Trump’s rally at the Garden were too numerous to list—these were events for what might as well be different countries. A few differences, however, stuck out: one was Trump’s insistence on trotting out the entirety of his weird MAGA entourage. Nine years into the Trump show, he’s marketing not only himself but an entire carnival of characters he’s turned into niche Trumpworld celebrities—the election-denying lawyer, Alina Habba, who exuberantly danced her way onstage in a spangled MAGA jacket; the TV host known as Dr. Phil, who earnestly explained to the crowd why, in fact, Trump was not a bully but was himself being bullied. Tellingly, the prime speaking spots, right before Trump came on, were reserved not for Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, or the most senior Republican currently in government, Speaker Mike Johnson, but for Trump’s favored family members and two of his biggest billionaire backers.
Harris, for her part, skipped the star power that has been a feature of many of her other rallies—there was no Beyoncé or Bruce Springsteen to draw attention away from what had been billed as a “closing argument” speech, an address that leaned hard on framing the election as a choice between Trump and his “enemies list” versus Harris and her “to-do list.” Much of the speech, in fact, consisted of her ticking through the items on that list—a poll-tested, focus-grouped, expert-vetted set of policy proposals, ranging from a federal ban on grocery-store price gouging to financial assistance for first-time home buyers and Medicare coverage for in-home senior care.
This, in theory, is what her critics have been pushing for—more detail, more policy, more of a sense of what a Harris Presidency would do. It was reasonable, rational, sober, and, in the age of Trump, an almost incredible anachronism. The rogue from New York has spent three consecutive elections blowing up the norms that once governed American politics, including, even, an adherence to basic constitutional principles. While I listened to Harris’s speech, I thought about what she is up against. It’s T. rex versus the technocrats, Godzilla versus the G-men. You do not have to be a monster-movie aficionado to know that the monster very often wins.
As I was leaving the Harris rally, word came of Joe Biden’s own “garbage” gaffe, in which the President, on a video call with Latino Harris backers, either insulted the Trump “supporter’s” attack on Puerto Rico as “garbage” or applied the “garbage” label to all of Trump’s “supporters.” Biden and Harris and every other Democrat on the planet who was asked about it apologized and insisted that no blanket insult had been intended and it was all a matter of a misplaced apostrophe. Trump, meanwhile, immediately seized on Biden’s remark as something close to a blood libel of his voters by the octogenarian President he very much would have preferred to run against. Never mind that Trump himself had just days earlier called America under Biden and Harris a “garbage dump for the world.” Never mind that he had spent the previous two days refusing to apologize for the “island of garbage” comment at his Madison Square Garden rally.
By Wednesday, his staff had found a garbage truck for Trump to ride on in order to call further attention to Biden’s comment, though, of course, it also served as a reminder of Trump’s own garbage-filled closing act. With just days to go in a race that is the closest of tossups, the video of the ex-President pointlessly circling an empty airport runway in a trash hauler provided an almost irresistible, if unintended, metaphor for a campaign—and a country—stuck in an endless Trump loop.
Onstage at a Wisconsin rally shortly after the stunt, Trump admitted that he did not want to wear the garbage-man neon vest that his campaign advisers had insisted he put on. But still he did it. What was striking, though, was how even Trump himself seemed to realize it might not have been the best idea. And he was right. Check out the video of him struggling to open the door of the garbage truck—not a great look for a seventy-eight-year-old seeking to become the oldest person ever elected President. The resulting photo op may go down in history with Michael Dukakis riding around in a tank in an ill-fitting helmet, or Calvin Coolidge uncomfortably sporting a Native American headdress. This, too, strikes me as another unintended Trump metaphor: America, like its ex-President, knows better, but it just might do the wrong thing anyway. ♦
