That Revolting Rally Was a Sign of Weakness

Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night was supposed to be the capstone event of his campaign, a triumphant celebration of authoritarian strength. With millions watching, he would march into the final week of the contest as a conquering champion, so popular he could fill an arena in deep-blue New York twice over.

Having energized his most fervent supporters, he would send them out to do whatever it took to return him to the White House. That was the idea, at least. But what works in theory does not always deliver in practice, and in practice, Trump’s climactic rally at Madison Square Garden was nothing short of a disaster.

Did Trump have the crowds he wanted? Yes. But that was the extent of his success that night. His overall message was dark, disturbing and as autocratic as you might expect from a man whose top officials have been warning us about his fascistic tendencies. “We’re running against a massive, crooked, malicious leftist machine that’s running the Democrat Party,” Trump said. “They are smart and vicious, they are the enemy within, we must defeat them.”

Overshadowing the crude authoritarianism of Trump’s remarks, however, were those of nearly every other speaker at the podium, who illustrated — each in his own way — the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the MAGA movement. There was, of course, the comedian from Texas who let loose a string of offensive jokes aimed at Blacks and Latinos, relishing the permissive atmosphere. Unfortunately for Trump, one of those “jokes” was an anti-Puerto Rican remark so racist that it galvanized some of the most prominent figures in Puerto Rican cultural life (“This is what they think of us,” Ricky Martin wrote in Spanish to his millions of followers on Instagram) and may have jeopardized the campaign’s standing in Pennsylvania, where hundreds of thousands of Hispanic Americans of Puerto Rican descent live.

There was also Stephen Miller, a former Trump White House adviser and close confidant of the ex-president, who ranted and raved against the idea of the United States as a composite nation forged from many different peoples. “America is for Americans and Americans only,” he said, jabbing the air as he stared out into the cheering crowd.

I’m sure that to some observers, all of this — even the terrible racist jokes — looks like the confidence and resolve of a determined political movement. But I think it’s just the opposite. Far from showing strength, the Madison Square Garden rally showed that however vicious and virulent its leaders and supporters might be, the MAGA movement is a spent and exhausted force, even if it is not yet defeated.