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”.
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.
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.
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.