In the final push towards Election Day, trump announced in early October a major rally in Madison Square Garden this Sunday with all the big name celebrities he could find - along with a number of Far Right media rage artists - to make his "big pitch" to the American People.
A lot of observers immediately compared it to the infamous American (Nazi) Bund rally of 1939, as trump's open love of Hitler and open desire to impose his brand of fascism on the nation made such comparisons unavoidable.
Well, this Sunday trump held his rally.
This is how bad it was. (via Marina Dunbar at the Guardian (US)):
Outrage is continuing to mount following the racist anti-Puerto Rican remarks at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York as Democrats, celebrities and even some Republicans condemned the incident.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe came under fire for comments made about Latinos and Puerto Rico at the Sunday rally.
“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. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” he said, among other controversial remarks.
In the hours following, Democrats and Hispanic groups on both sides of the political aisle have condemned the comments as “offensive” and “derogatory”.
trump never did work with dog whistles. he always went straight for the bullhorn to express his rage and fear towards Latinos (and Blacks, and Asians, and women, and Jews, and every other demographic that he couldn't comprehend or respect). And at that rally, he let the haters and fearmongers like Hinchcliffe go straight for the bullhorns to announce as loud as possible how vicious they are.
That quote Dunbar referenced wasn't even the worst of it. David A. Graham at the Atlantic documented more Far Right atrocity:
We might as well start with the lowlight of last night’s Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. That would be Tony Hinchcliffe, a podcaster who’s part of Joe Rogan’s circle, and who 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...”
Hinchcliffe defamed and derided every Latino in the United States, not just the migrants crossing the borders to find work and homes for their families, but also every Latino whose lineage in this country stretch back centuries: As far back as the Mexican Tejanos who sided with Sam Houston to form a Texan Republic in the 1830s, and with all the Californian and Southwest Latinos who came with the territory grabs after the Mexican-American War in the 1840s.
Hinchcliffe - and by extension trump and every Republican who worked that rally - basically insulted Puerto Ricans - who are by birth American citizens and every bit the equals of these Republican haters - for no other reason than that they are Spanish-speaking Hispanic residents of the United States.
None of this was a joke. It was intentional. All of trump's rally was a festival of racist drivel (as Graham notes):
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.”)...
Only after this did Trump take the stage and call Harris a “very low-IQ individual.” He vowed, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.” He proposed a tax break for family caregivers, but the idea was quickly lost in the sea of offensive remarks...
This is how far fear and racism have driven the modern Republican Party. And this is what trump thinks is a winning message for his campaign, even as the expected outrage and blowback are dominating this last week of the election.
Republicans who are not MAGA diehards reacted with dismay and horror—presumably at the political ramifications, because they can’t possibly be surprised by the content at this point. Politico Playbook, a useful manual of conventional wisdom, this morning cites Republicans fretting over alienating Puerto Ricans and Latinos generally (Yesterday, Harris visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia and received the endorsement of the Puerto Rican pop superstar Bad Bunny.).
“Stay on message,” pleaded Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a New York Republican in a tight reelection race. That’s ridiculous. This—all of this—is the message of Trump’s campaign. Other Republicans may cringe at the coarseness of these comments, or worry that they will cost votes, but they made their choice long ago, and have stuck with them despite years of bigotry and other ugliness.
Trump is running on nativism, crude stereotypes, and lies about immigrants. He has demeaned Harris in offensive and personal terms. He’s attacked American Jews for not supporting him. His disdain for Puerto Rico is long-standing, and his callousness after Hurricane Maria in 2017 was one of the most appalling moments of an appalling presidency. He feuded with the island’s elected officials, his administration tried to block aid, and he tried to swap the American territory for Greenland...
Reports on social media are rife with planned pro-Harris rallies in major Puerto Rican communities in places like Allentown, Pennsylvania, a battleground state that can easily side to Harris if enough angry Puerto Ricans show up at the ballots. I can tell you Florida holds one of the largest stateside population of Puerto Ricans, and I know them to be insanely patriotic as well as culturally attuned to their own community (and the ones I knew were mostly Republican, one was even deeply MAGA. I wonder how they're feeling about their idol trump now).
The residents in Puerto Rico are ironically enough American citizens, but because of the territorial status they can't vote in federal elections. They must be fuming at their inability to punch back at trump and the Republicans for this travesty. (If the Democrats win Congress this 2024, they need to address this injustice by granting Puerto Rico statehood at the earliest.) One can hope that the 5.6 million who DO live in the states and who CAN vote will avenge their loved ones back home.
This does beg a question: Why? Why at this late stage when trump and the GOP need to scrounge for every undecided voter still out there, when they need to appeal to a more broad - and less racist - demographic of Americans, why did trump and company go Full Racist on the national stage?
Part of it is because trump genuinely believes this is a winning message. he ran on an openly racist campaign against Mexicans, Chinese, and Middle Easterners the second he came down that escalator in June 2015, and he thinks it helped him "win" a broken Electoral College that 2016... even as he ignores how he lost the popular vote that year, and that the same campaigning failed him in 2020.
The other major reason is desperation. The early voting numbers, while not officially counted, are arguably trending towards Harris and the Democratic Party by landslide numbers. The way the turnout is going, it's looking like Harris can easily win enough battleground states to where trump's cries of "stolen votes" or act of sabotage won't work.
So he's doing what he did in the lead-up to the January 6th Insurrection: Rile up his faithful and violent MAGA base with derogatory race-baiting. Make the racists who are already believing the worst about Mexicans and Haitians and now Puerto Ricans into fearing them even more, driving that fear into hate and making that hate fuel acts of violence.
The observation gained by trump's constant calls for his followers to "show up, be wild" is that he wants confrontation between the Far Right and the rest of the nation. He wants more Charlottesvilles, trump wants more moments where his extremists have free reign to attack the Left-leaning counter-protests, and induce terror in average Americans so that they dare not question him or his grabs for power and money. trump believes he can profit from the chaos spurred by street fights sparked by the Nazis and extremists that back him, and that when the blood starts flowing the rest of White America - who are not as to-the-bone racist as he is, but still driven by certain prejudices - will panic and side with him and the Republicans in the coming battle...
If trump doesn't win at the ballot box this November 5th, and if trump can't win in the courtrooms following the election with his false claims of "stolen votes," trump will go to Phase Three: street war and chaos. If he cannot rule he will do everything to ruin.
We cannot let trump win either way. Stop him at the ballots, and stop his followers from whatever acts of violence they hope to inflict on the rest of America.
Get out the vote, people. Make it a Blue Wave, to wash away every trace of trump's rage and fear.
1 comment:
Considering all of the hundreds of thousands of voters in swing states they insulted at their Nazi rally, I can't help but think of what Molly Ivins said about Clayton Williams' ill-fated run for governor: "A politician can trip over his own dick a few times, but he shouldn't just stand there and stomp on it over and over."
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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