Michelle Goldberg
Opinion

Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again Lollapalooza at Madison Square Garden on Sunday began with an iconic scene from the 1970 biopic “Patton” on the jumbotron. Strutting in front of a giant American flag, George C. Scott, playing the legendary World War II general, growled, of the Nazis, “We’re not just going to shoot the bastards. We’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.” While it was nice, I suppose, to hear anti-Adolf Hitler rhetoric at a Trump rally, the belligerent talk of total war was unnerving in the context of a campaign focused on crushing internal enemies.

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The event, which featured almost the entire MAGA firmament on a bill that stretched for more than six hours, opened with a set by a Texas comedian and podcaster, Tony Hinchcliffe. His unadulterated racism somewhat surprised me, given that the Trump campaign usually tries to serve its bigotry with a filmy veneer of plausible deniability. “These Latinos, they love making babies too,” he said. “There’s no pulling out, they don’t do that, they come inside, just like they did to our country.” He continued, “I don’t know if you 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.” Then he made a crack about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween.

It was one of the uglier Trump rallies I can recall, which is saying something. Speaker Grant Cardone, a businessperson and high-profile Scientologist, said of Trump’s electoral opponents, “we need to slaughter these other people” and referred to Kamala Harris’ “pimp handlers.” David Rem, who was billed as a childhood friend of Trump’s, held up a crucifix and called Harris “the Antichrist.” (Then he announced he was running for mayor.) Radio personality Sid Rosenberg said Democrats were “a bunch of degenerates,” prefaced by an expletive. Trump once again described Democrats as “the enemy from within.” The stadium’s saturated red lights and the frequent use of screaming heavy metal walkout music gave it all an infernal carnival feeling, like watching pro wrestling in hell.

I doubt the event helped Trump win many votes. New York is not, despite the fantasies Vivek Ramaswamy spun onstage, a swing state. Hinchcliffe’s slurs against a key voting bloc proved an in-kind contribution to the Harris campaign, leading Puerto Rican artists including megastar Bad Bunny to throw their support behind her.

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But the rally still served several purposes. Trump, who spent his life longing for the acceptance of an elite Manhattan that saw him as a joke, probably found it deeply validating to be venerated at Madison Square Garden. “The king of New York is back to reclaim the city that he built,” crowed Donald Trump Jr. Beyond stroking Trump’s ego, Sunday’s display of dominance in one of the bluest places in America seemed designed to create a sense of inevitability around a Republican restoration. “The insanity has to stop and the fact that we can pack Madison Square Garden in the heart of New York City shows me that the spirit of the American people is there,” Trump Jr. said.

There was, throughout much of the event, the sense that Trump’s followers would reject a Harris victory, but Tucker Carlson, in his manic, giddy speech, made it overt. It was a deeply dishonest performance that nevertheless contained an essential truth about the nature of Trump’s bond with his base. “He’s liberated us in the deepest and truest sense,” Carlson said. “And the liberation he has brought to us is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies. Donald Trump has made it possible for the rest of us to tell the truth about the world around us.”

This is at once absurd and correct. Neither Trump nor Carlson is, of course, interested in truth in the empirical sense. But Carlson is right that Trump has set him free to express the rancid truths of his heart. Trump removed the taboos that once would have stopped an ambitious conservative entertainer like Carlson from embracing Holocaust denial, as he did just last month. He’s freed him to dismiss the idea that Jan. 6 was an insurrection, a notion Carlson treated as risible on Sunday. And, most significantly, Trump has given Carlson and the rest of his followers permission to dismiss the idea that he could lose fairly, given how much love there is for him even in the supposedly hostile territory of Manhattan.

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After mocking Harris as a “Samoan Malaysian low IQ former California prosecutor,” Carlson argued that if she’s declared the winner, it should be regarded as a big lie. “It’s very hard for me to believe the rest of us are going to say, ‘You know what, Joe Scarborough, you’re right,’” he said, sarcastically invoking the MSNBC host. “You’re right, she won fair and square ’cause she’s just so impressive. I don’t think so. And to me, that is liberation. It’s the freedom to say what is obviously true as a free man and not a slave.”

The message the MAGA caravan brought to Madison Square Garden was that their movement will soon be utterly unconstrained. “The United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer,” Trump said, before pledging “the largest deportation program in American history.” Delivered in the center of a city with more immigrants than any other, it felt like the inside-out promise of an occupation to come. Election Day, Trump said, would be “liberation day.” Sunday was a glimpse of what his version of liberation means.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Michelle Goldberg/Damon Winter
c. 2024 The New York Times Company