It is not quite right to say that you never know what you’re going to get from a Donald Trump campaign event. You might see some things, up to and including the richest man alive showing up and capering about behind Trump like a weird child, but fundamentally people go to these events for the same reason that people stand around in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, which is to wait for and then witness the one big thing that they know will happen. Taken on its own, there’s nothing much to the jerky descent of a bedazzled ball at midnight, and probably even less to a peevish former president pivoting disconcertingly from side to side before horking up some undigested chunk of reactionary cable-news gristle at mid-size convention center, but also there doesn’t really have to be. There isn’t really any version of either that qualifies as “good” in any of the conventional senses, and it seems notable that both experiences have a great deal of old-fashioned standing around built into them. But that concern, and ideas about what is or isn’t good, is beside the point. The point is to be near something meaningful and big.
In the weeks leading up to Sunday’s rally at Madison Square Garden, in which Donald Trump’s third presidential campaign made its closing argument in the form of a grim spume of slurs, threats, and dusty old bigotry, the broader enterprise had started to seem exhausted. The one thing that is true about every Trump rally is that Donald Trump will at some point appear onstage and talk about whatever is on his mind for longer than anyone expects or quite wants. Sometimes Trump is gleaming and voluble and geeked-up, and at others he is dusty and dour and flat; the sounds he makes will necessarily depend upon whether the crowd is being graced with Wet Trump or Dry Trump, and that in turn will depend upon a number of factors having to do with Trump himself, and how invincible he is feeling that day. Everything Trump says will be about himself, always and in every case, but if there is no way for the people waiting on long lines to be let into some fairground or rentable venue where they sometimes have baseball card shows to know which version of this they are going to get, they are nevertheless there to get it. It is not and will never be communion, but it is a chance to witness and worship an authentic American icon as he describes, at length and with no great urgency, whatever he saw on cable news earlier that day.
Trump spent the weeks in the run-up to his Madison Square Garden rally more or less shorting out—arriving hours late to rallies; muttering through podcast interviews with bored-seeming members of the Let’s Go community; wandering around stages with a faraway look on his face while the Undertaker’s seven-minute WWE theme played; responding to multiple audience members fainting at a rally first peevishly and then by saying “let’s make it into a music” and subsequently kind of swaying and grimacing for 40 minutes while various bombastic songs—”Ave Maria” and “November Rain” and Elvis Presley singing “Dixie”—shuffled over the PA system. No one really knows what to do with or about this, but they know that they can only say it is good, on purpose, normal, and popular. At one point during the Let’s Make It Into A Music rally, Trump started doing a weird little dance with his hands, which South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who was supposed to be asking him questions, did her best to pick up. But there wasn’t any choreography to learn, and he stopped doing it once Noem started; whatever this was or was supposed to be, the big fella was dancing on his own.
Polls still show the race as very close, although even the people paid to explain what that means seem uncertain about that. Trump’s campaign has projected bravado and triumphalism throughout both because it doesn’t ever and can’t really do anything else and for reasons that are, if you want to be generous, strategic. The former is because it is a fundamental tenet of Trump’s campaign that he has never been wrong about anything, which is also why campaign surrogates go out of their way to talk about his unprecedented stamina and energy whenever he makes one of his more melatonin-scented public appearances. The strategic aspect would come into play after a Trump loss in November, as such a defeat would arrive to his followers as inconceivable and obviously fake. That belief, theoretically, would power the next attempt on Trump’s part to overturn that outcome through the courts or other means. In the absence of any meaningful consequences to date for Trump where his last attempt was concerned, this has become one of those deranging things that everyone has just kind of walked around knowing about more or less since they got done cleaning up the mess from the last time it happened.
The rally on Sunday was nominally about Trump, and dutifully circled the spent and degrading bulk of the man that pins this rancid movement in orbit. But, as with so much contemporary conservative politics in its current amphetamized Influencer Era, it wound up being as much or more about the multiply aggrieved individuals in Trump’s orbit who took their turns onstage trying to do what Trump does. These were shitty roast comics and disgraced ex-Mayors and disgraced ex-wrestlers and disgraced TV psychiatrists and radio hosts, disgraced scions of similarly disgraced American political families and Trump’s weedy sniffling adult sons and Tucker Carlson and the various free-riding kooks and replacement-level elected masochists and aspiring genocidaires aiming to sneak into power by hiding their hideous chittering forms behind Trump’s luxurious width. All of them aired their specific individual grievances—the people and institutions and various vulnerable minority populations they hated, the things they thought should happen to them—before asserting that only Donald Trump would make those offenses stop.
This is not really a group of people that do well with the concept of unison for reasons having to do with (sort of) ideology and (more urgently) their own appetites and issues and awful personalities. The main idea, all throughout, was that Trump would hurt and humiliate the people that the speakers wanted hurt. There was, as there always is, something uncanny about the performance of all of it, not in the standard stilted artifice of American politics—those fusty old norms were nowhere in evidence here—but in the ways that all these individuated and bespoke grievances had warped the people getting up there, one after another, to express and embody them. They looked and sounded wrong, unnatural; they leered and cackled and boomed, they were shiny or dusty or poreless, and they whistled like teapots full of boiling vinegar—not like a chorus, not at all, or not anymore than a bunch of blaring car alarms might be said to be harmonizing.
The joke that broke contain came from one of the more obscure names on the program, a roast comic and podcaster named Tony Hinchcliffe who was known to me previously for getting dumped by his talent agency when he said a bunch of oafishly racist shit after being introduced by an Asian-American comic back in 2021. Hinchcliffe has nevertheless performed on various celebrity roasts since, and did something like his usual routine here, just with various racial, ethnic, and religious minorities swapped in as punchlines for, like, Rob Riggle or whatever half-famous person would usually have been sitting onstage behind him. It didn’t go over very well in the room, and went over much worse outside of it; “this is what they think of us,” Ricky Martin wrote, concisely, about a gag in which “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” was revealed to be Puerto Rico. (NBC Latino reported that, while mostly eating it at a comedy club the night before, Hinchcliffe “said multiple times during his routine that he would get a better reaction ‘tomorrow at the rally.'”)
It’s easy to see why he might’ve thought that. These were lousy jokes, but they were not really different in form or content from Trump’s own material; they punched down in the ways and directions that Trump’s people have learned to cheer. But without the insulation provided by Trump’s fame and platinum-plated impunity and residual razzamatazz, and given smug voice by this Store Brand Anthony Cumia, the gags landed on the dais all ugly and inert and exposed. It’s not that the grievance itself put anyone off—the crowd would thrill to different versions of the exact same shit from other speakers over the next several hours—but that the person offering it was just “some fucking jerk,” as one GOP donor told Rolling Stone, and not the bloated grown-up Boss Baby avatar who has been the main character of American public life for nearly a decade now. Without the extra implication Trump brings to this material, which is more or less the promise that the man playing around with all that ugliness might someday make those jokes real, the audience had no use for them.
Trump remains at the center of all this, he is that vengeance’s expediter and dumb scowling face, but there is also the sense of him receding. He’s receding because he has been degrading in plain sight for nearly a decade and can’t deliver the sort of performances that he used to, but also because the movement around him—that coalition of crabs in a barrel all posting and posturing and praying over him and busily trying to get over on each other, selling him and selling him and selling him to anyone they think might buy—has by now very nearly outgrown him. It still needs Trump because it hasn’t replaced him; none of these other vile washouts and goofs and TV casualties and clammy eliminationist tryhards are as famous or charismatic as Trump even in his current diminishment. But the fantasy shot through this otherwise incoherent closing argument was both plain enough to see and obviously, luridly metastatic.
That idea was, is, and will continue to be hurting people; the change, maybe, is that Trump is now the hammer doing the smashing, and no longer the strong hand swinging it. It is the dream of this movement, of all the people on stage and the people looking up at them, of the rich grotesques funding it and the servile cadres of eggheads, meatheads, and buttheads eager to do their dirty work, to drop the annihilating weight of Trump on their neighbors and coworkers and families, to push a button with Trump’s face on it and turn their own long rosters of enemies into mist. What binds all these people to Trump has always been the desire to hurt people and get away with it in the way that he always has; they believe that they’ll be able to do that so long as they stay behind him. A whole vile worldview and way of life depends upon that being true.
This is not designed to persuade as a political appeal any more than a slur shouted from a passing limousine is an invitation to conversation. It is just the bloody subtext of the old conservative dream of stopping history and replacing the future with the past raging into the fore, a threat repeated over and over, by people you maybe sort of recognize or remember but who all seem very different now, lit up as they are by this new appetite. One after another, they vow revenge against everyone that is not them and everything that is not already theirs. It is not an argument, or an offer, or a joke. It’s just what it sounds like.
