Choosing Madison Square Garden as the New York City venue to showcase Donald Trump’s vengeful and divisive rhetoric had already evoked connections to the pro-Nazi rally held in the same location in 1939. But who Trump chose to platform at the event Sunday, and what they said, suggested that the comparisons weren’t far off.
Speaking before thousands at “The World’s Most Famous Arena,” Trump’s guests leaned into the white nationalist “great replacement theory,” donned Nazi-adjacent iconography, and aggressively defined the idea of who is—and who is not—an American.
“The cartels are gone, the criminal migrants are gone, the gangs are gone, America is for Americans and Americans only,” said Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Trump known for his vicious anti-immigrant policies. “One man, and that man, ladies and gentlemen, that man took a bullet for you, he took a bullet for democracy.”
"America is for Americans and Americans only" -- Stephen Miller pic.twitter.com/5RryeOndlz
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 27, 2024
Tech billionaire Elon Musk also attended the Manhattan event, wearing a full black getup that he described as “dark, gothic MAGA.” But critics noticed something strange on the front of Musk’s hat. Instead of using the normal font seen on Trump’s red “Make America Great Again” caps, Musk opted for something decidedly more Germanic: the Fraktur font, popularized during the early years of the Nazi regime.
Another guest at the blue-state campaign stop was podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe, who launched the lineup with a crass joke about Latinos, claiming that the ethnic group loves “making babies” before mocking Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”
Ex–Fox host Tucker Carlson also made an appearance, choosing in part to make fun of Vice President Kamala Harris’s mixed-race heritage.
“It’s gonna be pretty hard [for Democrats] to look at us and say, ‘You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive,’” he mocked. “As the first Samoan-Malaysian low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support.’”
But not all of the fascist appeals stemmed from Trump’s allies. After allowing Republicans to flounder for weeks while attempting to justify or brush aside his controversial “enemy from within” remarks, Trump himself suddenly decided to double down on authoritarian language.
“They’re smart and they’re vicious, and we have to defeat them,” he said. “And when I say ‘the enemy from within,’ the other side goes crazy. Becomes a sound—‘Oh, how can he say’—no, they’ve done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within.”
