Will Donald Trump Go Full Fascist at Madison Square Garden?
Donald Trump admires Adolf Hitler.
As appalling as that statement is, even more repugnant is the fact that it is hardly news and yet Trump has thrived in American politics nonetheless. We know thanks to Trump’s wife that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches, My New Order, by his bedside. He has dined with Nazis and defended them publicly. He has used the language of Nazis as ABC’s Jonathan Karl has written “referring to his political opponents as ‘vermin’ and saying illegal immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of country.’”
This week, in an article in the Atlantic by its editor Jeffrey Goldberg, entitled “I Need the Kind of Generals Hitler Had,” Trump’s longest serving chief of staff, retired four star Marine general John Kelly, repeated accusations that Trump would say admiring things about Hitler.
Others Goldberg spoke to confirmed Kelly’s assertions. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s presidency, said Trump was fascist to the core.
Of course, the attention span of the American media being what it is, there is every reason to think that this story might again fade from view as it has in the past. But now, Trump’s entire campaign is planning a high-profile event that will ensure references to Trump and MAGA and Hitler and Nazis remain front-of-mind as campaign 2024 enters its final full week.
On Sunday, Trump will be holding a rally at Madison Square Garden. Doing so has political pundits scratching their heads to begin with because Trump has zero chance of winning anything of note in New York City, the place that knows him best and therefore hates him most. (In prior elections his performance in the city and especially in Manhattan was anemic.) Even filling the hall is likely to be a challenge unless Trump pays off attendees as he has in the past.
But this rally resonates for a different reason. In February 1939, the German-American Bund also held an infamous rally in Madison Square Garden (which at the time was in a different location in mid-Apple). Already politicians and commentators have brought up the uncomfortable similarities between the highly antisemitic, pro-Hitler event months before the war in Europe started. But given the developments of the past few days, the comparisons with the 1939 event are likely to grow more common.
Certainly, Trump’s well-known admiration for autocrats and the deep-seated racism and antisemitism that has suffused his comments and behavior throughout his life supports the thesis. But the reality is that Trump doesn’t run away from it. He bragged he owned a copy of Mein Kampf (although he did not, it was actually My New Order). He would grow puffed-up sharing a story, very likely made up, that the crowds at his rallies rivaled those of Hitler. When challenged for using Hitlerian vocabulary like the references to poisoning the blood of the country, he doubled down and did it more.
These facts and many more like them are the reason that when on a CNN Town Hall on Wednesday night host Anderson Cooper asked Trump’s opponent in the upcoming presidential election on Nov. 5, Vice President Kamala Harris, whether she thought Trump was a fascist, her answer was unequivocal. “I do,” she said. She said it because he is one. (Remarkably, Cooper later asked her whether Trump would be better on issues important to Jews. She responded well but missed the opportunity to say, “You mean the Donald Trump who likes, praises, and mimics Adolf Hitler?”)
Nonetheless, much like the spineless politicians and industrialists who praised or normalized Hitler’s rhetoric, character and objectives prior to his seizing power as Germany’s Führer, virtually the entire leadership of Trump’s Republican Party have either defended Trump or sought to minimize his remarks. Admittedly, they have failed because Hitler was, after all, one of the worst human beings in the history of the planet, a mass-murdering, dictatorial monster and, despite that…or perhaps because of it…Trump has repeatedly associated himself with him.
Journalists, meanwhile, join wittingly or otherwise into the efforts to blunt the effect of the hideous reality that a man who has said he would be a dictator from day one, that he would turn his military against his enemies and that he would set up concentration camps to house millions of those he says are poisoning our blood, not only admires Hitler but actually intends to emulate him.
They pretend that Trump’s economic policy positions should be evaluated much as if he were a normal candidate and in so doing they distract from and thereby normalize a guy who is telling us repeatedly that he will end America as we know it by following in the footsteps of the author of the greatest crimes against humanity the world has ever seen.
There are, of course, full-on Trump apologists like the couch full of fawning lightweights over at Fox and Friends. On Thursday, they tried to counter Kelly’s statement that Trump meets the definition of being a fascist by saying, unpersuasively, something roughly like “He’s not far-right, why would you call a fan of Hitler, Putin, and White Supremacy far-right? He’s no dictator. Everybody wants to turn the army against their enemies.”
Perhaps it is the nonchalance with which Trump embraces the horrific, perhaps it is the solidarity of his party in shrugging off the fact that their leader is so dangerous, perhaps it is the fault of the media for their coverage. But, whatever the reason, until this week Trump has been able to become the first mainstream American politician to celebrate the worst human being of all time. (Perhaps that’s why so many among us also shrug it off his bromance with contemporary war criminals and brutal autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.)
But there are signs that this week may mark a turning point and perversely, Trump himself may be responsible for the coup de grâce that ensures that in the final days of this campaign his fascism and the high regard in which he apparently holds men like Hitler may finally be given at least some of the attention from voters they warrant. (Let’s be honest. If people were to give it the attention it deserved, Trump could not be elected dog-catcher.)
First, came the Kelly revelations and others like it in Goldberg’s excellent Atlantic article. Then, came an interview with Kelly in the New York Times that included audio recordings of the general describing Trump’s profound flaws in his own voice.
In addition, Harris has done what few other political leaders have dared to do and regularly called out Trump both for his fascist words, tendencies, and agenda and also on issues like his apparent admiration for Hitler or his decision to send COVID testing equipment to Vladimir Putin while millions of Americans suffered without access to such urgently needed tools. She called the revelations that Trump coveted generals like Hitler’s “deeply troubling” and “dangerous.”
As reporters compare the two MSG events of 1939 and 2024, they will be struck by the similarities. A giant picture of George Washington towered over the crowd in 1939 as the Bund sought to make themselves—just as MAGA does—seem like the most American of Americans.
The rhetoric embraced by speakers 85 years ago is echoed today at all Trump rallies with similar references to participants as patriots and promises to return America to real Americans. Naturally, the nativism and racism that were core to Hitler supporters in 1939 are also core to MAGA rank and file today. And the right in 1939 and today both use the same slogan to describe their credo: “America First.”
The 1939 rally included an incident in which a Jewish protester ran on stage and was beaten and the entire event was cordoned off from the city itself by a never-before-seen display of police. But it won’t take such displays to make Sunday’s event resonate. The past week’s headlines should do the trick.
And, I might add, not a moment too soon. It is time that the real issue at the center of the choice voters face is decisive in this campaign. Being a fascist and admiring Hitler should have disqualified Trump long ago. But whatever the reasons that he has progressed this far may be, it is high time voters acknowledge them and eject him from American public life a week from this coming Tuesday.
When the Bund took place, one of America’s foremost political commentators at the time condemned it on the radio. He said, “In every corner of the land, America was nauseated. The American press unanimously condemned it as the vilest sacrilege ever perpetrated in the name of American freedom.”
Unfortunately, we cannot expect the same from either the American people nor from some in our media this week, when an even more dangerous man headlines an even more dangerous event at the Garden. There will be defenders and equivocators, that we must expect.
But, taken in conjunction with Harris’ clear-eyed and strong denunciations of this central element of Trump’s unfitness for office, the stories that made headlines this week, and what we know of Trump, this week’s event should, in a sane world, be enough to move Trump closer to the final political defeat he so richly deserves.
David Rothkopf (Twitter) is CEO of The Rothkopf Group, a media company that produces podcasts including Deep State Radio, hosted by Rothkopf. TRG also produces custom podcasts for clients including the United Arab Emirates. He is also the author of many books including Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, Superclass, Power, Inc., National Insecurity, Great Questions of Tomorrow, and Traitor: A History of Betraying America from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump. His daily newsletter "Need to Know" is available at davidrothkopf.substack.com.
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