There was nothing ‘Nazi’ about Trump’s New York rally

‘I’m thrilled to be back in the city I love’, said Donald Trump, taking to the stage at New York City’s iconic Madison Square Garden. The rapturous support for Trump at his rally on Sunday – with 20,000 in the arena, and thousands more on the streets outside – was a triumphant homecoming for the former president and current Republican candidate. Trump, a native New Yorker who made his fortune and name here, has endured a barrage of partisan attacks in recent times, with local Democratic lawmakers trying to bar him from doing business and taking him to court (in May, Trump was convicted of 34 felonies brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg).

Trump returned to his hometown at a time when he’s feeling confident about his chances in next week’s election – so confident that he took the fight to the heart of this traditionally Democratic city. ‘Trump has created a movement, there’s no doubt. I can’t think of another Republican figure of my lifetime who could’ve come into a Democrat city like New York and put together anything like that’, said ABC commentator Jonathan Karl. Some of Trump’s fans saw it as more of a revenge tour. ‘It’s a smackdown of all the people who tried to pull him down and all these people that are indicting him’, said a public-school teacher at the rally to the Wall Street Journal. ‘And now he comes to the Garden. It’s like the biggest New York f-you you could give.’

The speakers joining Trump were a reminder of how his populist pitch has realigned American politics. The eclectic list included former Democrats Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and his vice-presidential pick, JD ‘hillbilly’ Vance. A motley cast of more obscure MAGA characters warmed up the crowd for some two hours before Trump emerged. This is not George W Bush’s Republican Party.

Democrats would agree. But they think Trump has turned the GOP into the Nazi Party. The still bitter Hillary Clinton, who famously lost to Trump in 2016, told CNN that he was ‘actually re-enacting the [pro-Nazi] Madison Square Garden rally in 1939’. In its coverage, MSNBC interspersed footage of Heil Hitlering attendees of an infamous 1939 rally, in which 22,000 American Nazis flocked to Madison Square Garden, with Trump’s 2024 rally. Kamala Harris’s running-mate, Tim Walz, said the Trump rally had a ‘direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden’. No evidence of Trump’s supposed Nazism was provided by these Democratic alarmists, other than the fact that Trump was holding a rally in a venue with the same name as one that hosted a vast Nazi rally 85 years ago (there have been four venues called ‘Madison Square Garden’ in Manhattan, and the current one did not open until 1968). As it happens, the modern Madison Square Garden has also hosted many Democratic Party rallies.

One look at the people at Trump’s rally would be enough to know that the Democrats’ charge of Nazism is nothing more than a slur. The crowd was very diverse – in attendance were many blacks and Latinos, Jews and Muslims, happily mixing and cheering on Trump. A video on X showed Trump supporters of different backgrounds having fun with this idea that they are all Nazis. ‘I’m the biggest and blackest Nazi you’ve ever seen’, says one. ‘I’m the Jewish Nazi’, says another.

In fact, Trump bragged from the podium that he was forging a multiracial, working-class coalition, hardly something associated with fascism. ‘We’re building the biggest, broadest coalition… including union workers and Border Patrol… police and firefighters… The Republican Party has become the party of inclusion’, he said. It is the Democrats’ condescension towards the working class, especially in the cultural sphere, that has driven many towards Trump.

Having no real proof of Nazism at work in the rally, the Democrats seized on some poor-taste comments from minor speakers who appeared earlier in the programme. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe told some unfunny jokes about Puerto Ricans and blacks. One speaker called Harris ‘the Antichrist’. Another said she had ‘pimp handlers’. These were crass remarks, and while the Trump campaign distanced itself from these speakers, their appearance certainly reflected badly on the campaign. But off-colour comments from a few MAGA warm-up acts did not turn the entire event into a ‘carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism’, as the New York Times described the rally. Nor were they evidence that the crowd was comprised of Nazis.

When you think about it, it’s downright perverse for Democrats to make the accusation of Nazism against Trump supporters – especially in NYC, at this particular time. Inside the rally were many Jews waving Israeli flags, while speakers repeatedly expressed their support for Israel. Elsewhere in the same city, on the Upper West Side, you have students and faculty at Columbia University harassing Jewish students and expressing support for Hamas. And yet there’s been hardly a peep of criticism of those students from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, for fear of losing their votes. And the Republicans are the fascists?

The charge of Nazism levelled against Trump rally-goers is a historically illiterate disgrace. By drawing this lazy comparison, the Democrats relativise and effectively minimise the extreme violence and oppression waged by Hitler and the Nazis against millions. It’s leveraging the revulsion people rightly feel about the horror of Nazism in the past in order to engage in cheap and cynical fear-mongering today.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton referred to Trump’s supporters as a ‘basket of deplorables’. Some say that cost her the election. In 2024, Harris and her surrogates like Hillary are at it again, now saying that half the country are a bunch of Nazis. It is hard to imagine how Harris will unite and lead all Americans, as she says she will do, when she holds millions of them in such contempt. For deploying the Nazi smear against the working-class people who have decided to give Trump another try, Harris and the Democrats deserve to lose again.

Sean Collins is a writer based in New York. Visit his blog, The American Situation.