Almost everything you’ve been told about Trump’s ‘fascist’ New York rally is wrong

Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden
Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden - ANGELA WEISS/AFP

Being in New York this weekend, curiosity demanded that I drop into the Trump rally in Madison Square Garden. As with all Republican events in the age of MAGA, this was a spectacle on a grand scale, and on the biggest of stages. A non-American audience may have found the experience bewildering – not least the arrival of Hulk Hogan, a surprisingly persuasive orator – and the intensity of the energy in the room (which doesn’t translate to TV clips) certainly had the flavour more of a religious revival than of a political conference.

But overall, that energy was positive and inclusive.

You sometimes hear speculation that the line-up behind Trump must have been hand-picked to include black, Hispanic and female supporters, and that this cannot possibly be representative of the wider audience at his rallies. This is untrue. There were men and women, grandparents and young children.

The audience was ethnically mixed, including from some unexpected quarters – not least “Albanians for Trump” draped in their national flag, and swapping their MAGA caps for qeleshes. No doubt there were some colourful characters – a man near me in the queue, visibly unwashed and swigging a gallon bottle of chocolate milk, climbed up a flagpole and proclaimed “I’m rising in the polls like Trump!” More typical was Debbie, a semi-retired grandmother from Long Island who had made the journey alone: “I’ve been in this line for three hours, and I don’t care whether I make it in – I’m here for Trump.”

One word I hardly heard: “Republican”. This is Trump’s party and, as has been clear for years, the MAGA movement is a cult of personality. But that does not make it inherently evil or fascist.

Many on the Left have looked to draw parallels with the infamous 1939 German American Bund Nazi rally, with MSNBC cross-cutting the two events on television and the Guardian claiming that Trump filled the arena with “anger, vitriol and racist threats”. Looking around at the Israeli flags hanging from the balconies, and the many Orthodox Jews attending in traditional dress (and MAGA caps), this is hard to swallow.

Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, hammered home Trump’s support for Israel as a key theme, while Howard Lutnick of Cantor Fitzgerald closed his remarks with a full-throated yell: “The first thing, we must elect Donald J Trump president because we must crush jihad”. His comically overstated delivery was typical of the range of speakers, who came across as more Groucho than Goebbels.

Trump’s speech itself was characteristic of his recent performances on the campaign trail. Rambling in places, it also elicited genuine laughs from the audience. He avoided divisive rhetoric, instead repeatedly stressing the need to unify all Americans (“Jews, Muslims, Catholics and Evangelicals”), and he made only very occasional indirect reference to election fraud.

His reference to the “enemies within” has been seized on by his opponent and some portions of the media as proof of latent fascist tendencies. Lest we get too carried away, we should remember that Margaret Thatcher used this same phrase of striking miners in the 1980s. That hardly precipitated a slide into full-blown fascism.

As Trump danced off stage to the strains of “New York, New York”, the Hispanic gentleman to my left, who had come with his nine-year old son, slapped me heartily on the back: “We just witnessed history here, buddy”.

In the media, the event has been overshadowed by a tasteless joke about Puerto Rico made by the Z-list comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. Hinchcliffe was at the bottom of the running order and addressed a half-empty room which was still filling up (very slowly due to the heightened security checks). The joke did not land at all with the crowd, and was a craven bid for virality, with some success, as Google searches for Hinchcliffe temporarily surpassed those for Taylor Swift. It was, however, a huge own goal from Trump’s team.

Whatever the outcome next week, this was an historic event. Trump addressed a packed hall under an enormous screen proclaiming “New York is Trump Country!”, with many thousands more supporters watching on big screens outside.

Polling suggests this is unlikely to be the case – despite the palpable fervour in the room – but it was a strong homecoming for Trump the consummate New Yorker, marred only by a careless oversight of one of the warm-up acts.

Having sat there for over five hours, watching the crowd thin out, I thought there were many things you could have called it: theatrical, overblown, schlocky. But it was no Nuremberg.


Robin Culshaw is an investment banker and provides advice to a number of political campaigns and corporate clients