Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival

of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism

Donald Trump, right, stands at a lectern on the stage at Madison Square Garden, facing a
large crowd surrounding him.

Former President Donald J. Trump on Sunday at Madison Square Garden. The rally featured
inflammatory remarks from the featured speakers, many of whom also spoke at the
Republican National Convention this year.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Donald J. Trump’s closing rally at Madison Square Garden on the second to last Sunday before
the election was a release of rage at a political and legal system that impeached, indicted and
convicted him, a vivid and at times racist display of the dark energy animating the MAGA
movement.

A comic kicked off the rally by dismissing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” then
mocked Hispanics as failing to use birth control, Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-
throwers, and called out a Black man in the audience with a reference to watermelon.

Another speaker likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute with “pimp handlers.” A
third called her “the Antichrist.” And the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked Ms.
Harris — the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father — with a made-up ethnicity,
saying she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California
prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

By the time the former president himself took the stage, an event billed as delivering the
closing message of his campaign, with nine days left in a tossup race, had instead become a
carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.

If the parade of speakers felt at times like a Republican National Convention reunion —
Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Carlson, Vivek Ramaswamy, Alina Habba, Lee Greenwood, the
Trump family all appeared — they seemed to have returned for a bonus fifth night that was
more inflammatory than the original in July.

The rally served as a capstone to an escalating series of remarks from Mr. Trump, who has
repeatedly said in recent days that one of the gravest threats that America faces is “the
enemy within.” Democrats have cranked up warnings of Mr. Trump’s descent into
authoritarianism as John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief
of staff, warned that Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist.

“When I say ‘the enemy from within,’ the other side goes crazy,” Mr. Trump said on Sunday,
mocking his critics.

Since early in his campaign, he has broadly promised an era of “retribution” if he wins. But
after a relative lull earlier this year, he has grown more specific of late, including promising
prosecutions against a variety of people if they’re deemed to have “cheated” in the election
and to fire the special counsel, Jack Smith, who brought two federal indictments against him,
and even suggesting throwing him out of the country entirely.

The Secret Ingredient Every Chili Needs Is Probably in Your Pantry

A Skeleton Bank of Understudied Species

My Co-op Says It Can Take Away My Parking Spot. I Say No.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump described the date of his potential election as a “liberation day” from
what he described as an occupation by invading migrants.

A large crowd of people outside Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. Many are wearing
Trump hats or shirts.

Long lines of supporters waited to enter the rally earlier on Sunday. Credit...Hiroko
Masuike/The New York Times

Melania Trump stands and waves. The crowd in the arena is behind her, many waving
campaign signs. In the foreground, two photographers have their cameras aimed toward her.

Melania Trump, Mr. Trump’s wife, introduced her husband at the rally. Ms. Trump has not been
a regular presence during this year’s campaign.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Ms. Harris’s campaign seized on the spectacle, and some Republicans, including from Florida
and Puerto Rico, denounced the comic’s comments about the island. Several influential Puerto
Rican superstars, Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, Luis Fonsi and Ricky Martin, lent their voice for
Ms. Harris on Sunday.

But Mr. Trump has paid little political price over time for his own inflammatory remarks in the
past — he has disparaged cities with large Black populations such as Detroit and Milwaukee
this year — let alone those of his surrogates and supporters.

The marathon of speeches — Mr. Trump took the stage two hours after scheduled — was often
infused with more self-indulgence than political strategy. Mr. Trump plainly enjoyed playing the
Garden, which bills itself as “the world’s most famous arena.”

“Kamala, you’re fired!” Mr. Trump said, returning to the line that he first made famous as host
of “The Apprentice.”

But he went so long that the crowd had begun to thin noticeably before he had finished his
78-minute speech.

The event was a spectacle that captured the unusual and sometimes ugly range of the MAGA
movement that has taken over the Republican Party from the inside over the last nine years.

Hulk Hogan flexed his muscles and ripped off his clothes, just as he did at the convention.
Donald Trump Jr. called his father a “badass.” The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who has
poured $118 million of his fortune to aid Mr. Trump so far, entered to a video of his rocket
booster landing, pumping his fists in the air. He promptly predicted the federal budget could
be slashed by one-third even as Mr. Trump rolled out deficit-expanding tax breaks.

Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser who influenced Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown,
used nativist language as he argued that only Mr. Trump would stand up and say “America is
for Americans and Americans only.”

The big surprise was a rare public speech by Melania Trump, who introduced her husband and
exited the stage with him after he had finished, as the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” blared.

The arrival of thousands of red hats at the symbolic arena at the center of a blue city in a blue
state was celebrated by Trump supporters who relished the chance to collectively thumb their
noses at the New York and national elite.

“Selling out the Garden means the MAGA movement has now arrived,” Jack Posobiec, the
right-wing activist with a big following on social media, said in an interview. “It’s Madison
Square Garden, it’s the center of everything, and to have this place filled with MAGA hats and
Trump supporters really goes to show you it’s not just the surprise win of 2016 — it’s a
nationwide movement.”

It was lost on no one that Mr. Trump was just miles from where he was convicted of 34 felony
counts earlier this year and still awaiting sentencing, and a short jaunt to Trump Tower, where
he opened his first presidential campaign in 2015.

From left, former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Speaker Mike Johnson and
Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida watching Senator JD Vance of Ohio speak at the rally on
Sunday.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

A close-up of people in the crowd, holding their hands in the air.

Mr. Trump opened his speech by asking the crowd a timeworn political line: “Are you better off
now than you were four years ago?”Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

The singular nature of Mr. Trump’s candidacy was emblazoned in slogan form on the
scoreboard above as he began to speak: “Trump will fix it.”

Mr. Trump opened by asking the crowd a timeworn political line: “Are you better off now than
you were four years ago?” It is at the core of Mr. Trump’s campaign against Ms. Harris ever
since she replaced President Biden, a switch he remains sore about. Despite being delivered
in a city that four years ago was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic and still deep in
shutdowns and closed businesses, and swimming in a high death toll, that line landed well.

Mr. Trump’s vows of mass deportation and inveighing against undocumented immigrants had
an audience in New York City, too, where thousands of migrants who crossed the southern
border without authorization have been given sanctuary and some residents have complained
about the use of city services to help them.

So many of the day’s warm-up speeches were spent portraying the former president as he
wants to be seen. Several speakers talked about him surviving a July assassination attempt
not in spiritual terms but in muscular ones, describing his toughness at “dodging” the bullet.
Many also falsely claimed he “built” the skyline in a city in which he was always seen as a B-
list developer with a small portfolio of buildings that he acquired long after they were
constructed.

“The king of New York is back to reclaim the city that he built,” his son, Donald Trump Jr.,
declared anyway.

The elder Mr. Trump, who normally speaks only glowingly about his late father, Fred, from
whom he inherited millions of dollars and the spine of his real-estate company, delivered a
surprising line about his parents as he reflected on how they would be receiving word of his
legal travails.

“I know my mother’s in heaven, I’m not 100 percent sure about my father, but it’s close,” Mr.
Trump said, to laughter in the arena.

JD Vance’s speech is on a screen outside Madison Square Garden, with people in silhouette
below watching.

Outside the arena, an overflow crowd watched Mr. Vance speak as the sun fell over the
city.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

A view from the high seats at Madison Square Garden with the crowd visible below. A screen
in the rafters is showing Donald Trump onstage.

Mr. Trump was just miles from where he was convicted of 34 felony counts earlier this year
and still awaiting sentencing, and a short jaunt to Trump Tower where he first began his 2016
presidential campaign.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

It was all a surreal scene.

At one point, the painter Scott LoBaido received a huge cheer when he flipped a middle finger
to the crowd before grabbing a paintbrush to paint an American flag as “America the
Beautiful” boomed. The grand finale was revealing an image of Mr. Trump hugging the Empire
State Building.

Later, the television host Phil McGraw, known as Dr. Phil, lectured the crowd on why Mr. Trump
did not fit the definition of “a bully” because a bully requires “an imbalance of power,”
seeming to ignore the fact that Mr. Trump has enormous power as a billionaire and former
president.

During the speech by Mr. Trump’s running mate, Mr. Vance, the entire arena spontaneously
burst into chants of “Tampon Tim” to disparage Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris’s
running mate.

“You all can say that,” Mr. Vance smiled. “I probably shouldn’t say that.

It was a rare moment of restraint at the microphone.

David Rem, a childhood friend of Mr. Trump, called Ms. Harris “the devil.” Grant Cardone, a
businessman, declared that the sitting vice president had “pimp handlers.” Sid Rosenberg
denounced Hillary Clinton as a “sick son of a bitch” for linking the Trump rally and a pro-Nazi
event at the arena of the same name decades ago.

Mr. Rosenberg called the entire Democratic Party “a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew-
haters and lowlives. Every one of them.”

When the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made his remark about Puerto Rico, there were groans
from many in the audience.

On the same afternoon, Ms. Harris was in Philadelphia, courting Pennsylvania’s significant
Latino population and stopping by Freddy & Tony’s, a Puerto Rican restaurant.

“Timing is everything,” David Plouffe, a top Harris adviser, wrote on X, posting clips of the two
side-by-side.

In his White House bid, Mr. Trump has banked on winning uncommon shares of Black and
Latino voters, in part by leaning into culture wars that split the Democratic Party.

In his speech, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. invoked his uncle, former Senator Ted Kennedy, for
creating Title IX for women’s sports. He used that heritage to defend his own current
opposition to transgender women participating in sports.

Mr. Carlson marveled aloud from the stage at following the party-switching Mr. Kennedy. “It’s a
realignment,” he declared. “It’s unbelievable.”

Twenty years ago, in the same arena, Rudolph W. Giuliani delivered the keynote address at the
2004 Republican National Convention, three years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack prompted
then-President George W. Bush to caution the nation against hate.

On Sunday, Mr. Giuliani leaned into overbroad stereotyping against the Palestinian people,
who he said “are taught to kill us at two years old.”

“I don’t take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at 2,” he said. “I’m on the
side of Israel.”

Mr. Giuliani praised Mr. Trump for coming to the city where he once served as Republican
mayor.

“This is where a Republican is not supposed to come,” Mr. Giuliani said. “Which is why Donald
Trump came here.”