Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night was supposed to be the capstone event of his campaign, a triumphant celebration of authoritarian strength. With millions watching, he would march into the final week of the contest as a conquering champion, so popular he could fill an arena in deep-blue New York twice over.
Having energized his most fervent supporters, he would send them out to do whatever it took to return him to the White House. That was the idea, at least. But what works in theory does not always deliver in practice, and in practice, Trump’s climactic rally at Madison Square Garden was nothing short of a disaster.
Did Trump have the crowds he wanted? Yes. But that was the extent of his success that night. His overall message was dark, disturbing and as autocratic as you might expect from a man whose top officials have been warning us about his fascistic tendencies. “We’re running against a massive, crooked, malicious leftist machine that’s running the Democrat Party,” Trump said. “They are smart and vicious, they are the enemy within, we must defeat them.”
Overshadowing the crude authoritarianism of Trump’s remarks, however, were those of nearly every other speaker at the podium, who illustrated — each in his own way — the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the MAGA movement. There was, of course, the comedian from Texas who let loose a string of offensive jokes aimed at Blacks and Latinos, relishing the permissive atmosphere. Unfortunately for Trump, one of those “jokes” was an anti-Puerto Rican remark so racist that it galvanized some of the most prominent figures in Puerto Rican cultural life (“This is what they think of us,” Ricky Martin wrote in Spanish to his millions of followers on Instagram) and may have jeopardized the campaign’s standing in Pennsylvania, where hundreds of thousands of Hispanic Americans of Puerto Rican descent live.
There was also Stephen Miller, a former Trump White House adviser and close confidant of the ex-president, who ranted and raved against the idea of the United States as a composite nation forged from many different peoples. “America is for Americans and Americans only,” he said, jabbing the air as he stared out into the cheering crowd.
I’m sure that to some observers, all of this — even the terrible racist jokes — looks like the confidence and resolve of a determined political movement. But I think it’s just the opposite. Far from showing strength, the Madison Square Garden rally showed that however vicious and virulent its leaders and supporters might be, the MAGA movement is a spent and exhausted force, even if it is not yet defeated.
Consider the absence from the stage of anyone in Republican politics who isn’t a bona fide MAGA acolyte. There were no charismatic Republican lawmakers fighting tough races in swing states. There were no popular Republican governors, not even vocal allies like Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin. There were no former rivals, reconciled to Trump’s leadership, like Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley. And there were no figures of perceived moderation and propriety that, if they were present, could lend credence to the notion that electing Trump would bring some version of stability back to American life.
Instead, the rally showcased an off-putting combination of D-list celebrities, including Dr. Phil and a visibly worn Hulk Hogan, and Trump sycophants, perhaps most notably Elon Musk, who has sunk tens of millions of dollars into the effort to put the former president back in the White House.
As for Trump’s speech, it was a long, meandering mess, less vigorous than it was, to borrow a phrase, low energy. There was no positive agenda, no optimistic picture for the country, nothing that came close to the tone of his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, when Trump would pivot, on occasion, to being a candidate of change and prosperity. Not this time: Trump gave the American public a rant, centered on his wounded ego and his desire for revenge and retribution.
Is this the message of a winning campaign with the energy and confidence necessary to push through to Election Day? Or is it the message of an undisciplined candidate who believes that his days in the spotlight are coming to an end and wants to make the most of them before he can no longer claim this kind of attention?
Consider the state of the Trump campaign overall. There are reports of rampant greed. Republican operatives have worried for months that Trump has left the party with an anemic get-out-the-vote operation. Musk’s attempts to contact voters have been marked by apparent fraud, and Trump himself seems more interested in baroque schemes to unravel an election defeat than he is in trying to win outright.
Trump has been unusually lucky as far as candidates for office are concerned. And he has real political advantages that should not be underestimated. But it is also important to remember that he’s not some mystical force — he’s not a man of destiny or the world spirit incarnate. He’s not destined to win every close, contested race. He already lost one. He makes a lot of mistakes, and under his leadership, Republicans have lost much more than they’ve won.
None of this means that Trump is headed for defeat or that he can’t win. But watching a lackluster rally headlined by the rambling patter of a tired candidate struggling to capture the attention of his audience, it is clear that neither he nor his movement has the juice. I know what failure looks like. At Madison Square Garden, I saw it on display.
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