Trump at Madison Square Garden rally.

The Trump American Bund decided to use Madison Square Garden to stage yet another of its Trump Reich rallies—complete with a sea of red hats, bankrupt Rudy Giuliani (taking a break from his criminal trials and liquidating his assets), and a valium-packed Melania who, when she greeted her husband on stage, had the blank look of Jodie Foster in Panic Room when confronted by one of her tormentors.

The rally made headlines because of the many racist jokes and allusions dished up in the Garden (“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. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico…”), although in the spirit of the buck stopping there, Donald Trump later said of the speaker:

I have no idea who he is. Somebody said there was a comedian that joked about Puerto Rico or something. And I have no idea who it was. Never saw him. Never heard of him, and don’t want to hear of him. But I have no idea.

Otherwise, the rally was simply a replay of the same speakers and speeches that serenaded Trump at the 2020 and 2024 Republican national conventions, as if no one in TrumpWorld could be bothered to come up with new material.

Trump made the same histrionic, self-inflated points he has expressed at every rally in the last year, and he delivered his formal remarks in the same See Spot Run monotone he has used to read all of his speeches. But with his endless digressions (“She even called for free sex change operations on illegal aliens in detention at taxpayer expense. Think of it. At taxpayer….She’s a radical left person from San Francisco. She destroyed the place. But she lied about that, but she also lied about something very important. For years and years, she said she had a job at McDonald’s…”), Trump’s speech lasted almost two hours.

In all it was a six-hour affair to announce: “Vote for Trump on November 5 and put an end to democracy.”

* * *

The mainstream media highlighted the vileness of the rally language, not just that used by Trump but the gems offered up by some of his bizarre pitchmen and women, who bounced on stage every ten minutes for the first four hours of the spectacle, after which Trump, himself, picked up the hit parade of insults.

For example, Associated Press led its account of the rally in this manner:

The event was a surreal spectacle that included former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, TV psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, politicians including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Reps. Byron Donalds and Elise Stefanik, and an artist who painted a picture of Trump hugging the Empire State Building.

The account in the New York Times began this way:

Donald J. Trump’s closing rally at Madison Square Garden on the second to last Sunday before the election was a release of rage at a political and legal system that impeached, indicted and convicted him, a vivid and at times racist display of the dark energy animating the MAGA movement.

Another speaker likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute with “pimp handlers.” A third called her “the Antichrist.” And the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked Ms. Harris — the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father — with a made-up ethnicity, saying she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

Despite the rage and bitterness of the rally (Nuremberg, missing only the columns of light?), Trump and Vance remain ahead in most of the battleground state polls, and have a 50 percent chance of getting elected on November 5 and, thereafter, implementing their not-so-secret agenda of turning the United States into a white-nationalist Christian nation in which it will be made clear that even Hitler “did some good things.”

* * *

It took me almost two days to watch all six hours of what felt like a Klan meeting under the big top at Madison Square Garden.

Sometimes, needing a break from the vitriol, I would read the transcript when I found the speaker to be especially grating. But then I would go back and listen to the offending passages, just to be sure that they were still speaking at a political rally and had not mistakenly drifted off into the tents of a freakish side show.

The Garden rally matters at many levels, not only because it was billed as the last occasion before the election when Donald Trump would summarize his case to be president to the American people; it would also offer him a last chance to evaluate potential members of his cabinet, from the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former member of Congress Tulsi Gabbard, both former Democrats. (Overall, Trump is mostly drawn to turncoats.)

The audition was reduced to one act: the supplicants had to prostrate themselves on the biggest public stage to prove their undying fealty to their lord and master, Donald Trump.

Here are some program notes from the footlights.

* * *

The evolution of Robert F. Kennedy from mainstream liberal Democrat to a Trump footman and shill is instructive for the lure that Trump’s return to power holds over many aspiring politicians from both parties.

Originally, Kennedy’s political following came out of his work for environmental and climate justice. Going back more than twenty years, he campaigned for a cleaner Hudson River and against strip mining in Appalachia.

Bobby Jr. testified in front of Congress, wrote articles and books, and even produced a documentary film on the degradations of strip mining called The Last Mountain (2011). Now as a wholly-owned Trump man, I would imagine he owns a few coal excavators.

Come the pandemic, Kennedy turned into a rabid anti-vaxxer, equating the work of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other doctors with shamanism and voodoo. But because RFK Jr. spoke well—despite suffering from spasmodic dysphonia, perhaps triggered by his years as a heroin addict—people at least gave him a hearing, which encouraged him to run for president in 2024 as a third-party candidate (arguing that both major parties were broken).

In theory, with the Kennedy brand synonymous with liberalism, President Joe Biden (then still in the race) and afterward Vice President Kamala Harris had the most to fear from an independent Kennedy candidacy.

Except that once he was in the race (albeit with same chances as Walter Mitty), Bobby Jr.’s positions were similar to those of Donald Trump in that he was pro-Putin, pro-fracking, and in favor of the market sorting out the climate crisis (even though that same market has turned the planet into a suffocating hot house)—to the point that most members of his illustrious Democratic family denounced his presidential campaign as a fraud.

In the end Bobby Jr. suspended his campaign but he remains on the ballot in several states, in hope of further screwing the Democrats. And he endorsed Donald Trump and agreed to serve on his transition team—and now is a headliner at his rallies.

At the Garden, trying to excuse his presence at a Trump rally, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to imagine that his famous father and uncle would also by now have become Trumpers. He said:

And I say I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me. This is not the party anymore of Martin Luther King, of Robert Kennedy, of John Kennedy, that was the party of peace, it was the party of constitutional rights, of civil rights, of freedom of speech, it was the party that wanted to protect and nurture the middle class, it was the party that stood up to censorship, to surveillance and stood up to the CIA, the military industrial complex and it was the party that wanted to protect public health and women’s sports.

Only after Kennedy was safely aboard Good Ship Tump was it revealed that his dalliance with a New York magazine reporter involved the receipt of her nude photographs.

Even though the exchanges lasted almost a year, Kennedy claimed he was the victim of sexual harassment and threatened to denounce his virtual lover to the police or sue her.

All this came from a man who as his second marriage was failing kept a diary of his double-digit, extra-marital sexual conquests (with a points system to indicate how well he regarded each conquest).

Now Kennedy’s role in the campaign is that of a Trump surrogate (on political issues; presumably Trump doesn’t need any help abusing women on his own), and he can dream of serving as Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services (and recommend leaches and bleeding as the most evident cures).

* * *

I confess that I scrolled through much of the speeches of Hulk Hogan and Dr. Phil. Hulk lost me with his introduction:

Well, let me tell you something, Trumpamaniacs, welcome to the house that Hulkamania built. You know something? Usually, when I’m in Madison Square Garden, I’m body slamming giants, I’m winning world heavyweight titles and I’m cracking people over the heads with steel chairs and the energy in Madison Square Garden is off the Richter scale. But today, Trumpamaniacs, the energy in here is something like I’ve never felt. The energy of all these Trumpamaniacs is the most powerful force in the universe and, today, this is Donald Trump’s house, brother. You know something, Trumpamaniacs? I don’t see no stinking Nazis in here, I don’t see no stinking domestic terrorists in here, the only thing I see in here are a bunch of hardworking men and women that are real Americans, brother.

But I do take Hulk’s inference that the phony appeal of professional wrestling speaks to the same attractions of the Donald Trump campaign.

Dr. Phil tried to gin up sympathy for Trump voters who have been harassed or cancelled, or, yes, “bullied” for announcing their choice in the election. He said:

Why am I here? I’ll tell you why I’m here. I’m here to talk to and stand up for the people who have declared their support for Donald J. Trump, or they got found out, or they want to do it, but they’re too intimidated. Because you know what happens when somebody in this country says, “Hey, I’m going to vote Republican. I’m going to vote Donald J. Trump.” They get canceled, intimidated, marginalized, excluded, or even fired or boycotted. And you know what that means? In short, that adds up to being bullied.

Sorry, Phil, but the last time I looked, it was the MAGA crowd (some wearing Viking headdresses) that was swinging the hockey sticks in the Capitol and relieving themselves on Nancy Pelosi’s desk.

* * *

I wasn’t surprised to see the talk show host and Trump enabler Tucker Carlson in the floodlights, although any time someone with pretensions to journalism turns up in a paid political advertisement I grieve a little for the independence of the profession.

The last time I caught up with Tuck Everlasting, he was in a gilded Kremlin chair and salon, performing unnatural (journalistic?) acts on the Russian dictator and hegemonist, Vladimir Putin.

Carlson gave Putin two hours of primetime coverage (with very few factual interruptions) so that the Russian dictator could explain why Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States, and much of eastern Europe are the rightful domains of Soviet Russia and why Putin was justified in attacking another sovereign nation, one that in 1994 Russia had agreed was an independent country.

The Putin interview proved several things: mostly that Tucker knows almost nothing about Russian history, and thus wasn’t in a position to push back, for example, when Putin said: “For decades, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic developed as part of the USSR, and for unknown reasons, again, the Bolsheviks were engaged in Ukrainianization.” (Here the word “Ukrainianization” can be understood as code for the Stalinist genocide carried out in Ukraine in the 1930s by the liquidation of the kulaks and mass starvation of the population.)

After throwing two hours of softball questions to Putin (I am assuming that Trump had a hand in reassuring his man Vlad that Tucker could be counted on as a sycophant), Carlson descended into the Moscow metro and went to a local supermarket where he gushed: “Moscow is so much nicer than any city in my country.”

It would have been way beyond C student Carlson to recall the similar words of Lincoln Steffens, who said in 1919, on his return from Russia: “I have been over into the future, and it works.”

If you want to imagine the appeasement polices of a future Trump administration toward Putin and Russia, watch the Carlson interview in the Kremlin.

* * *

After resting up from his adventures in the Moscow subway, Carlson next found time to host a two-hour interview on his syndicated television program with Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer Daryl Cooper.

Cooper told Tucker that the “chief villain” of World War II was Winston Churchill (not Adolf Hitler), and Carlson sidled alongside the Holocaust “explainer” with his own white nationalist thinking on the great replacement theory, which has people of color squeezing white Americans out of their own country (a core belief of Trump ralliers).

Cooper said: “Millions of people ended up dead, but that wasn’t their [the Nazis] intent.”Maybe it was the Jews themselves who built all of those extermination camps, such as Treblinka and Majdanek?

Tucker’s headlining take on his guest, the Nazi-loving Cooper? He wrote: “Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States. His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.”

Is it any wonder, then, that at the Garden Carlson could riff that Kamala Harris could well be “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

If that isn’t discouraging, consider that it was Carlson—together with son Don Jr.—who pressed Trump Sr. to select J.D. Vance to run as his vice president.

It’s hard to imagine two men besides Carlson and Don Jr. who know less about world history, but Vance could be that man.

* * *

Most of the Trump henchmen and women giving air time at Madison Square Garden were basically run-of-the-mill crazy.

Trump attorney Alina Habba came out dressed for a roller disco and hung her glittering jacket over the lectern, as if it were a bar stool. Then she rapped to the crowd about “he da man” Trump as if he were a celebrated gang figure (as I suppose he is).

Russian and Syrian bot Tulsi Gabbard decided to turn history on its head and said: “…a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for someone who will defend freedom and every one of our God-given rights that are enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights,” unless, I suppose, that’s the day he’s appearing as a dictator and, as he has promised, suspending the Constitution.

Someone called David Rem seized the mic to say how Trump’s father, Fred, had paid his school tuition after his own father had died. He passed himself off as a “life-long” friend of Donald Trump, until it became clear they only met a few weeks ago. Rem waved around a crucifix while saying:

Can you imagine Kamala Harris performing a random, kind, generous act like that? Never. Never, ever. In fact, she is the devil, whoever screamed that out. She is the Antichrist. At her rally last week, she said that, “Jesus Christ followers are not welcome at my rally. You should go down the block to President Trump’s rally.” Let me say this, and maybe I’m speaking for the President and I shouldn’t, but I think that President Trump loves Jesus followers at his rally. And I think that President Trump, in what he has experienced, knows that Jesus Christ is king.

Then there was a real estate promoter, Grant Cardone, who said, in equally manic tones:

Ladies and gentlemen, Kamala Harris is the least qualified candidate to ever run for any political office in American history. She makes her boss look competent. She’s a fake. I’m not here to invalidate her. She’s a fake, a fraud. She’s a pretender. Her [sic – grammar has never been a strong suit of the Trump crowd] and her pimp handlers will destroy our country. They will. They’ve already crippled the dollar, manufactured inflation, imported a virus, censored your voices, funded transgender surgeries, and made empty promises to the middle class for 50 years.

Presumably, the ventriloquist Trump could later say of his colleague and talking dummy (Cardone) who called Kamala Harris a prostitute, “I have no idea who he is.”

* * *

By far the eeriest remarks at Madison Square Garden came from former White House aide and consigliere Steven Miller, the Dr. Evil of a Trump restoration.

With his head shaven, wearing a tight suit which seemed to have a hit-man cut to it, and seemingly the kind of person capable of having long conversations with himself, the wound-up Miller said:

In nine days, your rescue is coming. In nine days, your salvation is at hand. In nine days, Donald J. Trump is going to go back to the White House. We stand here today at a crossroads, in the history of this nation, in the history of our civilization. This is a choice between betrayal and renewal, between self-destruction and salvation, between the failure of America or the triumph of America. I want you to think for a minute about the decades of abuse that has been heaped upon the good people of this nation, their jobs looted and stolen from them and shipped to Mexico, Asia, and foreign countries, the lives of their loved ones ripped away from them by illegal aliens, criminal gangs, and thugs who don’t belong in this country, a political system that punishes hardworking citizens, oppresses them at every turn, takes away the right to free speech, the right to political expression, the right to fundamental safety in their own country. Who’s going to stand up for our daughters? Who’s going to stand up for the girls of America, the woman of America, the families of America? Who’s going to stand up and say, “The cartels are gone. The criminal migrants are gone. The gangs are gone. America is for Americans and Americans only?” One man. And that man, ladies and gentlemen, that man took a bullet for you. He took a bullet for democracy. And all we are asking in return, all we are asking in return is for nine days, for nine short, precious days, you have to vote, vote, vote. Vote for freedom. Vote for liberty, vote for sovereignty. Vote for your children. Vote for your families. Vote for the right of free speech, the right to the Second Amendment.

Clearly, to Steven Miller, Trump is a cross between Jesus and another misunderstood white supremacist, Adolf Hitler.

* * *

Four hours into the tedious auto-erotic Vegas floor show, Melania Trump was called to the stage to introduce her husband (so that in turn he could speak for another two hours).

Melania uses fashion to express her rages (remember her “I really don’t care, do you?” jacket that she wore to a migrant child detention center?), and here she was wearing a below-the-knees zebra-print jacket, as if maybe she was an endangered species. Seemingly her message to her porn-star loving husband, who might have preferred something with a little more décolletage, was: “I really don’t care, do you?”

One way to interpret the entire Madison Square Garden Trump Follies was that it was an effort by Donald to appear on stage with his wife and force her into a public reconciliation—at least something long enough to be spliced into the 30-second TV spots to air the night before Election Day.

No doubt in exchange for a six-figure appearance fee, Melania showed up at the Garden, but her glum facial expression was that of a hostage who might well have used lipstick to write “Help me” on the palms of her hands.

She never mentioned Trump by name nor did she speak of any of his wonderful qualities. Instead she talked dyspeptically about New York City, ending by saying: “Let’s seize this moment and create a country for tomorrow, the future that we deserve.” Such a sentence could be used on just about any occasion, including if she planned to murder him backstage.

From a polite distance (they looked like a couple in the waiting room of a marriage therapist), Trump leaned in to kiss his wife, and all she offered him was a turn of both cheeks—the way Europeans greet strangers in a formal setting.

Melania has rarely been on the political stage since a court in New York convicted her husband of sexual abuse against E. Jean Carroll and fined Trump $83.3 million for defaming Ms. Carroll over several years (by denying publicly that he had violated her).

And what did Trump say of Ms. Carroll that increased the damages due to her to $83.3 million? He said: “Totally lying. I don’t know anything about her. I know nothing about this woman. I know nothing about her.”