Republican presidential nominee and former US President Donald Trump speaks on stage during a rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York, US, October 27, 2024.
Credit: Reuters Photo
By Timothy L. O'Brien
New York is an idea and experiment as much as anything else. It’s one of the world’s few truly diverse international cities, and it has spent generations throwing its doors open to newcomers, strivers, workers, dreamers and innovators.
It’s wildly imperfect, of course, as aspirations tend to be. Still, it remains irresistible for anyone hoping to have some of that magic rub off on them, including Donald Trump.
His family secured its fortune here, and he got his first taste of celebrity in Manhattan, the start of a lifelong addiction. The city’s authentic real estate barons considered him a cartoon character and publicity hound but abided him because, well, New York. Characters came with the turf. Sometimes they even made things more interesting.
As time went on, though, the relationship fractured. Trump’s White House tour, and his loose relationship with the law, decency and democracy, alienated enough New Yorkers that he no longer felt loved, and he decamped for Palm Beach. He returned to New York last year and earlier this year for court trials that left him with guilty verdicts for sexual assault and civil and criminal fraud. That seemed to represent closure in the fullest sense imaginable.
So it’s curious, though not perplexing, that Trump found his way to Madison Square Garden on Sunday evening for perhaps the most high-profile final lap of his presidential campaign.
New York is deeply Democratic. Though Trump and other speakers at the Garden tried to suggest that the city and state are in play, it will remain blue on Nov. 5 and for the foreseeable future. From a strategic sense, it made no sense for Trump to be there rather than in one of the seven swing states that will decide the election’s outcome.
But Trump isn’t a strategist. Never was, never will be. Strategy didn’t inform his visit. Neediness and media exposure certainly did, however. Trump still wants New York to love and accept him. He also knows that it’s a media capital unlike others, and I suspect he couldn’t bring himself to trade it for Las Vegas, Atlanta, Charlotte, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Detroit or Milwaukee. He thrives on the eyeballs.
He also didn’t seem to care that the Garden had once hosted a large Nazi rally soon before World War II — something he might have been sensitive to in the wake of former White House advisers warning that he has a proclivity for fascism. Ever the salesman, he plowed ahead because he had a pitch to make.
“The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion,” he allowed, and there’s “something very nice about that.”
That didn’t land for me. Trump and a long line of speakers who preceded him during a six-hour slog at the Garden kept referring to various and nefarious people they accused of trying to tear him or the country apart. Inclusion didn’t really seem to be an authentic part of the vibe.
“When I say the enemy within, the other side goes crazy,” Trump shared. “They have done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within.”
“America is for Americans and Americans only,” Trump adviser Stephen Miller recommended.
Tucker Carlson described Vice President Kamala Harris, who is an American of Jamaican and Indian descent, as a “Samoan-Malaysian low I.Q. former California prosecutor.”
“They thought they could kill him,” attorney Alina Habba said of the lone shooter, a registered Republican, who tried to assassinate Trump earlier this year.
“This country was built on hard work, added value and talent,” offered Dr. Phil McGraw. “Not on DEI.”
“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,” said Tony Hinchcliffe. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” (Hinchcliffe bills himself as a “world-renowned comedian” who tours with podcaster Joe Rogan.)
And so on.
The entire affair was reminiscent of the Republican National Convention’s final night in July, when Trump’s meandering acceptance speech was preceded by circus acts. Hulk Hogan showed up at the RNC, and he was at the Garden, too. He tore off his shirt again. Elon Musk catapulted onto the stage, offered a primal scream, and then went on to share his plans for gutting government spending (even though he presides over two companies, Tesla and Space X, that have been nurtured with government money and rely on government contracts).
“I’m not just MAGA,” Musk said. “I’m dark, gothic MAGA.”
Trump was so somnambulant and unfocused that it took a lot of work to discern his closing argument, beyond that everyone is out to get him and he’ll get them first. He promised to end wars, tame inflation and make a long list of things great again, including America. Amid digressions into “secret” plans he hinted at for how the GOP will take control of the House of Representatives, he also often wandered into his own fruitcake obsessions. He compared himself at one point to “the late, great Al Capone.” He’s been bonkers for quite some time, and he’s growing more unhinged with age.
He dunked on politicians who need teleprompters but was reading from a teleprompter on and off all evening. When he used the teleprompter, it came across as dutiful sleepwalking through the lines his handlers had prepared for him. When he wasn’t getting help, he free associated in epic heaps of word salad.
A closing argument surfaced occasionally.
“We’ve been fighting against the most sinister and corrupt forces on Earth,” he noted. “With your vote in this election, you can show them once and for all that this nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you.”
In the context of Trump’s political base, “you” seems to mean his predominantly White, male and rural supporters. It’s not a pitch that really screams “inclusion,” for however much Trump wanted viewers to believe him.
When he was done speaking, he treated attendees to a rendition of “New York, New York” from Christopher Macchio, an opera singer who frequents Trump events. Although Macchio’s website describes him as having “a golden-era voice imbued with a timeless passion and romantic sensibility,” his version of the ballad was jarring enough to leave Frank Sinatra, who made the ode to the city famous, rolling in his grave.
Apropos, though. Trump came to New York to take a victory lap and rekindle an old flame. But it ended up feeling very off tune. New York has moved on.