It's Springtime For Donnie In MSG

Duane Patterson 10:30 AM | October 28, 2024
AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Last Thursday night, the Kamala Harris campaign deployed Hillary Clinton, not exactly known for her closing skills, to clean up after Harris' disastrous town hall on CNN with Anderson Cooper the night before. Hillary made a wildly hysterical prediction - that Donald Trump would be holding a Nazi rally at Manhattan's famed Madison Square Garden in a few days. I figured she was a rhetorical outlier on the left. Little did I know it would turn out to be Kamala Harris' latest iteration of a closing argument. 

I must confess, I have only been in that building for one event - the Republican National Convention for George W. Bush's re-election campaign of 2004. It was a remarkable week. We were still in the first few years after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and the attempted strike on either the White House or the U.S. Capitol before American Airlines Flight 77 crash landed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The Global War on Terror was well underway on two fronts, and there was still fear that another strike on the Homeland was imminent. Security surrounding MSG was intense. You had to show ID just to get within blocks of the venue, and overhead, 24/7, was the constant drone of helicopters with manned guns pointing out the open back door. When one helicopter needed refueling and/or personnel change, another chopper took its place on station to make sure nothing remotely dangerous got close to the arena. 

Sunday night's rally for Donald Trump did not have quite the same ring of protection, but it did have about 50 times the energy level that I saw in 2004.

Here's Hillary Clinton with what became the talking point for the left.

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Tim Walz picked up on the marching orders. 

For her part, Harris hasn't picked up the Nazi rally line directly, but has maintained for the last few days in whatever public appearances she's held that Donald Trump is a fascist. And speaking of public appearances, if one side's campaign is calling the other side Hitler, is this the best of all possible fashion and backdrop choices? 

But Sunday night, on MSNBC, Jonathan Capehart was cutting in with live shots as Madison Square Garden was packing itself to the rafters and gave his viewers this little riff. 



For now, this is the new low point for American media on political rhetoric and analysis. It's about a vile as anything that has put on television. It ignores the fact that political rallies and conventions have been held several times at Madison Square Garden, besides the 2004 RNC I attended. And in that year, the left referred to George W. Bush as Hitler, too. 

In 1976, Jimmy Carter was there. 

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You can go even further back in time to 1962 when John F. Kennedy, that noted Nazi, was in NYC at that very same venue. 

Back to Carter, he and his Democratic Brown Shirts had so much fun in '76, they returned to Madison Square Garden in 1980.

And who could forget the Democratic National Convention in 1992 at, you guessed it, Madison Square Garden, with Bill Hitler and Al Mussolini? 

Of course, this rhetoric is stupid and pathetic. It reeks of desperation. If calling your opponent Hitler isn't getting the desired result this time, pound the desk and scream that your opponent is Hitler. That'll do the trick.

Before turning to what Donald Trump actually said, which in any sane universe would be weighed as to how Hitler-y the event was or not, let's go outside the arena, where tens of thousands of people were gathering in the streets in support of the former and future President. Many of them were Jews. 

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Seems like an extraordinarily large amount of Jew Nazis outside the building. But inside the campaign equivalent of the Rhineland on the Hudson, let's see how unified the Nazi message was. 



You know what you typically don't find at your standard Nazi rally? A Black woman singing the National Anthem. 

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In 2016, Hillary Clinton called half the country voting for Donald Trump a basket of deplorables. She paid dearly for that, as it turned out. Eight years later, Hillary and the Harris-Walz campaign, along with their allies in regime media and online, are literally calling half the country Nazis. In 1990, attorney and author Mike Godwin coined Godwin's Law, which states that the longer a conversation goes, especially one online, the odds of a comparison to either Hitler or Nazis approaches 100%. In this cycle, Godwin's Law wasn't just a certainty, the time it took for the left to get there can be measured in microseconds. 

There are many problems with the left oversaturating the national conversation with this rhetoric. First, of course, is how insidiously dangerous it is in inciting violence with unstable people. But perhaps most important, it minimizes the supreme evil Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were. Here's Jerry Wartski, 99-years young, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, and also was at Donald Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden. 

 

Here's another rally attendee, also Jewish, who is not at all pleased with the left's closing argument. 

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So just out of curiosity, what did Trump talk about at the Nazi rally in New York? Lots of things. 

Inclusion:


Hope:


Gratefulness:


Unity:


Here's the good news, besides Trump's message. The Hitler/Nazi stuff isn't working. It's backfiring. Donald Trump passed Kamala Harris in Real Clear Politics' national average of polls. He never led in any national poll at any point during 2016 and 2020. He now leads in the average of all of them. Trump maintains about a point lead in the Battleground state averages. And remember, the median margin of miss by the polling outfits making up this average is around 4.6%. Trump is winning, despite the vile rhetoric on the left. 

In New Hampshire, an interesting poll was released over the weekend. New Hampshire is not supposed to be a swing state this time. Kamala is supposed to be leading by upper single digits - 8 or 9 points. Here's the first one from Praecones and the New Hampshire Journal.

Months ago, I wrote a column here about how I believed New Hampshire would be the canary in the coal mine Election night. It's a small state, relatively few votes to count, and the polls close at 7:30. If it's a fast call for Harris, probably not too bad a night for the Democrats ahead. Too close to call or an upset by Trump means all is lost for Kamala Harris. 

Here's another tidbit from center-left political reporter and podcaster Mark Halperin. 

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How close? About three points, enough to trigger a Halloween rally in the Land of Enchantment by Donald Trump. I remain unconvinced Trump will win New Mexico, but the state of play is that the presidential contest has got to be too close for comfort for the Democratic Party, because Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is dumping a bunch of last-minute money into the re-election campaign of Marty Heinrich, who was thought to be in one of the safer seats to defend in the Democratic conference this cycle. 

Nothing changes as far as you're concerned. You still have to vote. It would be nice if you brought friends to vote with you. If you live in a swing state and can volunteer to help in turn out the vote efforts, you really need to. The bigger the margin, the lesser the ability for the Democrats to cheat. The bigger the blowout, the bigger the House and Senate coattail effect. The larger the victory, the greater the meltdown in the media and the fever swamp online. 

Eight days to go. Tying this back to Mel Brooks' The Producers show-stopping number, Trump World is happy and gay. 

Tags: DONALD TRUMP TIM WALZ HITLER KAMALA HARRIS NAZIS ELON MUSK

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