Trump’s Fascist Rhetoric At MSG Strengthens Harris's Closing Argument
Kamala Harris has been contrasting Donald Trump's self-centered, fear-mongering, vindictive fascism with her campaign's focus on helping people. At Madison Square Garden, Trump proved her point.
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Vice President Kamala Harris’s closing message has been one of contrast. She has presented Donald Trump as a self-centered, vindictive authoritarian only concerned with power while she is focused on helping the American people. To put it in simpler terms, “Trump has an enemies list. I have a to-do list,” Harris has repeated often in the past week.
Harris has made it a point to spotlight Trump’s promise to use the military against the “enemy within” (meaning fellow Americans). Recently, she’s gone even further, citing Trump’s longest-serving Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, who went on the record claiming that Trump often praised Hitler and that he believed Trump fits the definition of a fascist. Harris’s goal is to elevate the threat level of a second Trump term in the minds of voters and to showcase Trump as the authoritarian egomaniac he is.
At Madison Square Garden (MSG) on Sunday, Donald Trump proved Kamala Harris’s point and sparked widespread backlash, indicating this rally may have backfired spectacularly.
The speakers featured at the event spewed racist, misogynistic, and authoritarian rhetoric, setting up Trump’s speech, which was filled with his usual migrant fear-mongering and attacks on the “enemy within,” aka people he disagrees with. The fascist messaging was palpable. The Trump Campaign was basically inviting comparisons to the 1939 Nazi rally at MSG.
The closing message the Trump Campaign chose to emphasize is telling. The crux of that message we saw at the MSG rally, and the core of Trump’s broader promise, is this: That he will rid America of those he has scapegoated, villainized, and dehumanized as the “other.” Rather than solve systemic problems, he’s convinced his base, the “other,” is to blame, and they deserve retribution. This is a classic authoritarian tactic and one the Republican Party has employed for decades, although more subtly before Trump, since the start of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
Trump’s attacks on immigrants aren’t just about undocumented immigrants. This is about rooting out whoever Trump declares is not a “real” American. Notably, Trump and his running mate Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) have also attacked legal migrants, targeting Haitian migrants in particular, falsely calling them “illegal.”
This message of removing the “other” was encapsulated in a quote from Trump’s longtime advisor, Stephen Miller, who proclaimed to the MSG crowd, “America is for Americans and Americans only!” Other rally speakers, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, also pushed the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory. All of this rhetoric echoed something Adolf Hitler often spoke of called “Volksgemeinschaft,” or a “people’s community,” which promoted the idea of a unified and racially pure German state.
It’s important to say outright that dehumanizing rhetoric always preludes dehumanizing policy.
As outlined directly in Trump’s Agenda 47 and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, he has explicitly promised to detain millions of immigrants in camps using local police and the National Guard, implement ideological screenings, end birthright citizenship, end student visas for people participating in pro-Palestine protests, and expand on his previous administration’s Mulsim ban. These are the kinds of policies Trump’s rhetoric is seeking to justify.
While much attention has been paid to what the other speakers said on the MSG stage, and I’ll get to them in a bit, what Trump said was just as extreme, vitriolic, and authoritarian.
When Trump took the stage, he unleashed what is surely a prosecutor’s dream scenario. He did the equivalent of standing up in the middle of his trial and demonstrating the behavior that he’s been accused of.
Thanks to the tireless, invaluable work of
’s and MeidasTouch’s Acyn, viral clips of the entire rally dominated social media and gave Americans an unfiltered view of Trump’s extremism.Donald Trump falsely called America an “occupied country,” lied about migrants being “imported” from insane asylums and prisons, and played a video trying to fear-monger about “migrant crime,” in spite of the fact undocumented immigrants commit crimes at significantly lower rates than native-born citizens. The crowd then chanted, “Send Them Back!”
Trump said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants and said that was when America had “law and order” - this was a time when slavery was the law of the land. Trump also called for the death penalty for any migrant who is convicted of the murder of an American citizen to a crowd that cheered and chanted, “USA!” Trump continued to lie about the Hurricane Helene response, called Harris a “low IQ individual,” and the list goes on.
Then, in overtly fascist comments, Trump repeated and expanded on his “enemy within” threats, specifically calling out Democrats and an imaginary cabal:
“We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala, and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious, crooked radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat Party... It's just this amorphous group of people... We have to defeat them. And when I say the enemy within the other side goes crazy… They’ve done very bad things to this country and they are indeed the enemy from within.”
Trump also alluded to a “secret” he had with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) that will be revealed after the election. Johnson confirmed the existence of a secret on Monday. This is ominous and worth watching, especially given the House’s role in deciding the election in the case of an electoral college tie.
Trump’s rhetoric continues to escalate, and he goes further and further in each rally. But this event, given it was at MSG and had an expansive lineup of speakers, garnered a lot more attention. Rightfully so. What the other speakers said was equally terrible.
Businessman Grant Cardone called Mark Cuban a “simp” and made a disgusting comment about Harris, saying that she "and her pimp handlers will destroy our country." Trump's friend David Rem said of Harris, "She is the devil. She is the antichrist." Another speaker called Hillary Clinton a “sick son of a bitch.”
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made the most viral comments of the night, disparaging Peurto Rico:
“There’s a lot going on, like, I don’t know if you guys know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
It was this moment that generated the most fierce backlash, sparking even Republicans to try and distance themselves from the comments given the Puerto Rican populations in states like Pennsylvania and Florida. But the damage was already done.
Latino celebrities, including Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin, shared videos of Kamala Harris’s new plan for Puerto Rico and endorsed her. Others expressed disgust over Hinchcliffe’s comments.
It appears all Donald Trump accomplished with this MSG rally was to remind voters how bigoted he and his MAGA movement truly is.
Mainstream media, across the board, covered the rally with the gravity it deserved. Journalist
gathered the damning headlines in a recent analysis of the MSG rally coverage. Here’s a remarkably straightforward headline from the digital front page of The New York Times, accurately depicting the depravity we all saw with our own eyes:
As we saw in the Republican Primary exit polls, MAGA extremism was toxic to Nikki Haley voters, and the 2020 election lies fell flat among that same group. Trump’s MSG rally will surely negatively impact him with any remaining undecided moderate Republicans and Independent voters.
This week, Kamala Harris is focused on delivering her closing argument to the American people, which includes highlighting the threat MAGA poses to American democracy. On Sunday, at a rally in Philadelphia, Harris talked about how we have the opportunity to turn the page on this tiresome extremism:
“We have the ability to to turn the page on that same old tired playbook because we are exchuasted with it! And we are ready to chart a new way forward, and yes we will be joyful in the process.”
Donald Trump just made that closing argument significantly more appealing.
My ancestors emigrated from an "island of garbage." The Irish thrived like Puerto Ricans -- who are Americans. MAGA will not.