Was Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally an evocation of Nazism?
An evocation of Nazism? Of course it was, and of course it wasn’t.
Like everything else in this election, the narrative cuts both ways.
Madison Square Garden is the iconic venue in New York City for spectacle. It’s a stage for the big event and lends cachet to a candidate closing out his campaign, no doubt.
In appearing at MSG, Donald Trump writes himself on to the same Wikipedia page as the New York Knicks, several hundred rock concerts and two of the three Ali-Frazier fights.
Throw “Nazi” into the search and you’ll find that too – the biggest Nazi rally in US history took place in the Garden in 1939, just months before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Something called the German American Bund hired it for an event, decorating the stage with swastikas for a rally billed as “pro-Americanism”.
Donald Trump set out his campaign closing message to voters in New York’s Madison Square Garden
For a venue that celebrates its history, there’s no hiding the shame. No hiding to the extent that it can’t have gone unnoticed by Trump campaign organisers, a team managing a candidate once branded “America’s Hitler” by his own running mate and “fascist to the core” by his former senior military adviser.
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Only last week, the description was echoed by his former chief of staff, John Kelly, who told the New York Times that Trump had said he wished his military personnel showed him the same deference Adolf Hitler’s Nazi generals showed the German dictator during World War Two. His claims have been denied by Donald Trump.
The MSG booking has been pounced on by Trump’s opponents, who portray him as a dangerous authoritarian laying out an agenda for autocracy in plain sight. For a second Trump term, they say, read Third Reich.
Hulk Hogan was among the campaign guests
Indeed, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has accused Trump of re-enacting the 1939 rally, calling him “more unhinged, more unstable” than when she faced him in 2016.
Trump’s team has branded that particular claim “disgusting,” pointing out that she herself has done an event at MSG and her husband Bill accepted the Democratic nomination there.
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Byron Donalds, a Republican congressman from Florida who spoke at the MSG rally, told Sky News: “That’s not even a question and you know that. It’s because opponents are dumb and they’re losing and they’re doing anything to get a rise out of voters. Stop that, be better.”
It’s a “nothing to see here”, is the response, with a certainty that any whiff of outrage will blow over. Confidence of Republicans is grounded in experience of handling a political candidate positioned competitively in a presidential race despite the baggage of sexual abuse, business fraud, criminal conviction etc, etc. There was a time when any one of those would have been terminal to a political career – not now.
It is controversy as background noise and a significant number of voters have stopped listening – significant enough to keep him in the race.
Anti-Trump protests took place across America on Saturday, with demonstrators decrying the administration’s immigration crackdown and mass firings at government agencies.
Events ranged from small local marches to a rally in front of the White House and a demonstration at a Massachusetts commemoration of the start of the Revolutionary War 250 years ago.
Thomas Bassford, 80, was at the battle reenactment with his two grandsons, as well as his partner and daughter.
He said: “This is a very perilous time in America for liberty. I wanted the boys to learn about the origins of this country and that sometimes we have to fight for freedom.”
At events across the country, people carried banners with slogans including “Trump fascist regime must go now!”, “No fear, no hate, no ICE in our state,” and “Fight fiercely, Harvard, fight,” referencing the university’s recent refusal to hand over much of its control to the government.
Some signs name-checked Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian citizen living in Maryland, who the Justice Department admits was mistakenly deported to his home country.
Read more: Donald Trump’s deportations explained
Pic: AP
People waved US flags, some of them held upside down to signal distress. In San Francisco, hundreds of people spelt out “Impeach & Remove” on a beach, also with an inverted US flag.
People walked through downtown Anchorage in Alaska with handmade signs listing reasons why they were demonstrating, including one that read: “No sign is BIG enough to list ALL of the reasons I’m here!”
Pic: AP
Protests also took place outside Tesla car dealerships against the role Elon Musk ahas played in downsizing the federal government as de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The protests come just two weeks after similar nationwide demonstrations.
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Organisers are opposing what they call Mr Trump’s civil rights violations and constitutional violations, including efforts to deport scores of immigrants and to scale back the federal government by firing thousands of government workers and effectively shuttering entire agencies.
The Trump administration, among other things, has moved to shutter Social Security Administration field offices, cut funding for government health programs and scale back protections for transgender people.
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