Ugly, malicious and spiteful: Trump’s New York rally leaves us in no doubt about his politics
Ugly. Malicious. Spiteful. Donald Trump’s latest large-scale event has done more to damage him than anything Kamala Harris could say.
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Ugly. Malicious. Petty. Spiteful.
I’ve taken a day to reflect on what we witnessed at Donald Trump’s much-hyped political rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, because sometimes your kneejerk reaction to an event like this fades and mellows with the distance of a few hours.
Not this time, and not even after a rewatch. There is no denying or sugar-coating or euphemising what we saw. It was what it was, and we should speak of it frankly.
That was Mr Trump’s original appeal, remember? “Telling it like it is”, without a filter. If it’s a virtue when he does it, that applies to the rest of us as well.
At its core Trumpism, for lack of a more original term, has never been about policy. It is not about lower taxes, abortion laws, NATO members’ share of spending on defence, or whatever other specific bugbear you might cite. Those things were merely the excuses used by elected Republicans, who knew what he was, to justify falling in line.
And it isn’t really about abstract ideas either; we have seen too many long-held conservative principles tossed in the gutter, forgotten and abandoned, in Mr Trump’s service now to pretend otherwise.
It’s a movement that is fundamentally based on vibes. On brandishing a proud middle finger to the cultural left. On pissing off the right people. Sticking it to the so-called “elites”, or the media, or the “woke”, or whatever other straw man we think is responsible for society’s ills.
It all ultimately boils down to a whopping “f*** you”, with some superfluous policy set dressing to make it seem more respectable.
Which is why Mr Trump himself can backflip and somersault and quadruple-corkscrew on pretty much any policy he likes without alienating his supporters. Not even the ones who tell the world, and I suppose themselves, that they support him solely for his policies, rather than his personality.
No, sorry, after almost a decade of this man standing astride global politics, and changing direction on a whim, and making fools of his own defenders, let’s cut the crap. It’s about the vibes, and those vibes are off.
Seriously off. Even more so, now, than they were in 2016 or 2020. The event in New York, with a line-up of speakers hand-picked by the Trump campaign, illustrated it.
Mr Trump was mocked in the usual quarters, ahead of time, for so excitedly promoting this rally. Holding it in New York, an uncompetitive state which will play no role in the outcome of the election, was seen as a silly waste of effort.
I actually disagree with that, quite strongly. It was a clever idea, one guaranteed to draw more attention to his message than your average campaign event.
But the message itself matters more than the vehicle. What a priceless opportunity for Mr Trump to present the best possible version of himself, and his movement, to wavering voters. What a chance to reassure Americans that the dangerous, nigh-apocalyptic version of him painted by his critics was a baseless caricature.
Instead the Trump campaign played right into those fears. It platformed a parade of people I might politely call “off-putting”, whose words were laced with resentment and bile. It straight-up validated his critics. Which made it a colossal own goal, from a strategic perspective, whatever else we might say from a moral one.
There is no point dissembling: this was a hate rally. I know many of you, reading this, will feel otherwise. But the one clear through-line, from hours of speeches, was unmistakeable.
You will want examples of this ugliness, I’m sure. Brevity restricts us to a small sample.
The alleged comedian Tony Hinchcliffe labelled Puerto Rico, an American territory which is home to more than three million (mostly brown) US citizens, a “floating island of garbage”. Mr Hinchcliffe later accused those offended by the “joke” of lacking a sense of humour.
Perhaps he is right. Perhaps I missed the axial moment in human history when genuine comedy was replaced by witless, racially-tinged insults. It’s certainly possible.
At another point he joked about Hispanic people breeding too much.
“These Latinos, they love making babies,” said Mr Hinchcliffe.
“There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.” Charming.
There are about 62 million Latinos living in America, a fifth of the nation’s total population, if you’re interested. A great many are citizens of what he called “our” country. One wonders how he would define “our” in that sentence.
David Rem, billed as a “lifelong friend” of Mr Trump, brandished a cross at the crowd while he called Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist”.
Radio host Sid Rosenberg had some thoughts about the state of the Democratic Party.
“She is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton huh? What a sick son of a bitch. The whole f***ing party are a bunch of degenerates, lowlifes,” said Mr Rosenberg.
Tucker Carlson, the one-time Fox News host who has since morphed into a sort of alt-right chuckling clown, playing to the internet trolls for laughs, suggested the sold-out crowd at Mr Trump’s rally was proof Ms Harris couldn’t possibly win.
“It’s going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, ‘You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes, because she’s just so impressive!’” he said.
“As the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support! And anyone who thinks otherwise is just a freak or a criminal!”
As a frame of reference, Joe Biden got about 81 million votes in 2020, in an election with fairly high turnout. Eight-five million would be a plausible result for Ms Harris, unless turnout is significantly lower than last time. We’ll see soon enough.
Oh, and her parents were from India and Jamaica. As far as I can tell, Mr Carlson’s joke there was about all the brown countries being indistinguishable from one another, though it’s quite difficult to parse for someone who lacks the far-right’s refined sense of humour.
Stephen Miller, the top political adviser during much of Mr Trump’s first term in the White House, who remains in that role now, said: “America is for Americans, and Americans only.”
That was news, one suspects, for the 50 million or so foreign-born people currently living in the United States – which has always been a country of immigrants, by the way – and making an outsized contribution to sustaining its economy.
Mr Trump himself, when he took the stage, described America as a country “occupied” by illegal immigrants, and repeated his previous rhetoric about Democrat-supporting Americans being “the enemy within”.
He has previously, repeatedly spoken of using the military to crack down on this “enemy”, which includes such criminals as former speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Adam Schiff.
I say “criminals”. Their only apparent crime is having too fulsomely opposed Mr Trump. Which amounts to treason, or something comparable, in many minds.
If you read all those quotes above and think, “Yeah, those people are talking sense. They’re the good guys. That is the quality of person I want to be running the most powerful country on earth,” then I really don’t know what to tell you.
This stuff is not normal. It’s not mainstream. It flirts with, and sometimes crosses, the border that divides the extreme from the utterly unhinged.
We have endured quite the tiresome argument, lately, about whether or not Mr Trump is a “fascist”, as has been suggested by his former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, and the most senior US military officer during his presidency, Mark Milley.
I’m not particularly interested in that debate. Who cares what word we ultimately use to describe this worldview? Words like this have largely lost their meaning anyway – Mr Trump routinely calls Ms Harris a fascist, and a communist, and a Marxist, and all sorts of things where the actual definitions render the rhetoric so preposterous as to become useless.
I do recall, though, years of Mr Trump’s supporters condemning his 2016 opponent, Ms Clinton, for calling some of them “deplorables”. What an outrageous slight this was! How irredeemably disrespectful towards her fellow Americans.
Nine years, now, of Mr Trump calling his political opponents far worse, on an escalating scale of dehumanising language. And not a peep of protest from the folks who thought Ms Clinton’s rhetoric was unforgivable. Not. A. Peep.
Look at yourselves. Think about what you’re applauding, what you’re actively encouraging. Mr Trump started, theoretically, as a businessman who would not mince his words or take any self-serving nonsense from the corrupt political class. Perfectly appealing, as a proposition.
What is he now? A man obsessed with his own personal grievances, who eagerly platforms people of what we might, kindly, call dubious character. Stronger words do leap to mind.
Nothing above forgives the shortcomings of Kamala Harris as a politician, or as a potential president. But let’s, at the very least, be clear-eyed about the alternative.
Twitter: @SamClench
Email: samuel.clench@news.com.au
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