Portside

A couple of weeks ago, Marshall Curry saw a spike in search interest in his Oscar-nominated 2017 documentary short A Night at the Garden, about the pro-Nazi 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden.

The reason soon became clear: Donald Trump was using the venue as a staging ground for a massive rally to finish off his 2024 presidential campaign. In the weeks since, everyone from a state senator to Trump’s 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton drew a comparison between Trump’s event and the one from 1939, anticipating a similar show of nativism and hate.

Curry had to see the rally for himself.

What he saw up close was something strikingly familiar, if no longer in black and white. He saw everyday Americans in good spirits listening as a comedian called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” He heard Trump pledge to jail or deport “vicious, bloodthirsty criminals,” language that echoed that of the ’39 rally’s keynote speaker, Fritz Julius Kuhn, leader of the German American Bund.

He also saw a broader coalition, including Muslims and many Jews, at Trump’s rally, a contingent he finds “puzzling.”

I spoke with Curry, who won an Oscar for his 2019 film The Neighbors’ Window, about what he saw. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What are some of the things that struck you watching this rally — did it echo 1939 for you?

I’d never actually been to a Trump rally. I’d watched them on television before, but it is a very different experience to be there in person. And part of what felt so disturbing is that the audience, when we were waiting to go inside, couldn’t have been more polite, fun, just normal people, as if they’re at a football game having a good time.

And when you got inside, it was like a switch was flipped, and suddenly all of these same people who are like my friends and family and neighbors seemed swept up by a lot of the dark stuff that was being spouted at them from the stage. And that’s the thing that struck me when I watched that footage in 1939, was that you see this audience of Americans in their hats and their suits and their dresses, and they’ve dropped their kids off with the babysitter and gone out for an evening to cheer and laugh as somebody attacks people who will be killed by the millions in the next couple of years.

Did you go in with the film crew? Were you sort of covertly filming? 

I didn’t have a film crew that got in, but I did have a pretty good camera phone, and definitely shot some material. But mostly it was about just witnessing it for myself.

Who was the Fritz Kuhn of this? We had the comedian who made those racist jokes, we had Stephen Miller. 

Trump is the master, of course. He’s the one who got them all there. He’s the one who set the tone, and has been setting the tone for 10 years now. I don’t think that Donald Trump is a Nazi — I want to be super clear about that — but he is a demagogue who uses the same types of tactics as Fritz Kuhn and segregationist governors in Mississippi, and that demagogues have been using since the days of Sparta. They call forth people’s darkest impulses. They fill them with fear. They use a dark humor. They use the symbols of patriotism to attack outsiders, whether those people are immigrants or religious minorities. And they do it in order to take power, and that’s what you saw. That’s what we’ve seen for thousands of years, and that’s what was happening that night.

The stagecraft was brilliant. The music was powerful and throbbing, and the videos of Trump, where he looked so strong and stalwart and handsome striding through the doors that opened as he arrived. It was really well done, and that was also part of what kind of rattled me.

But then, Trump took the stage, and it was also a very weird experience, because he seemed to read off of a teleprompter for about five minutes, and then he kind of did his little meandering thing. And people started to leave! And that was also extraordinary, to see him unable to hold some of the crowd.

There are at least gestures at some sort of a broader coalition here. There were Muslim leaders there, and then obviously there were Jewish people as well. What’s your take on that?

That’s true, and it was this kind of puzzling experience to see some of these gestures, and then to have a comedian say that Puerto Rico is a garbage island, and to see Stephen Miller say “America is for Americans” and to hear people just rail about immigrants and trans people. The number of times that people talked about immigrants killing Americans, immigrants raping little girls, on and on and on.

I saw that he had gotten a Muslim mayor to endorse him and other folks on stage, and I remember eight years ago when he ran for president on a policy of keeping Muslims from being allowed into our country because of their religion.

Fritz Kuhn had a similar policy, a full stop of refugees. In that case the religious minority was Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe, but a similar dynamic and a similar tool to define religious minorities as the other, and team “us,” real Americans, against those people who are here to take our things and destroy our culture. The gestures at inclusion are really confusing to me, because it sounds like he’s doing better with Latinos than Republicans have done in the past. I certainly have Jewish friends who are supporting him, and I find it puzzling.

Does your filmmaker mind go to “How would I edit this?”

I don’t know. I mean, they thought it through. They’ve already made a movie. What you almost need is something to pull you out of the movie. You are in an overwhelming, massive, throbbing soundtrack, fast-cut action movie and you have no agency in it; you’re just being swept by a tide of emotion.

The flipping and flopping between different things was disorienting. You’d have him say, “We’re gonna destroy China.” People would say things like that, and then they would say, “He’s the peace candidate.” And they would attack people, and then they embraced them. It made me think about that famous Steve Bannon line about the whole goal was just to flood the zone with shit.

In the past, when I’ve watched Trump speeches, I’ve watched them in small bits that were digestible and I could listen, I could analyze, I could weigh how I felt about them, and I could critique them and offer a response. And when you’re in that room, the flood of misinformation and twisted points of view, frankly, overwhelmed my circuits. Somebody would say inflation is skyrocketing, and you’d say, “Well, actually, I think it’s come down to a low level at this point,” and by the time you’ve even formulated that sentence, there’s five new things you now have come at you. And that was also a different experience to just feel like your circuits get overwhelmed by the quantity of it.