Paywall-free link: https://archive.ph/pE2Yf
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
Also:
The grand finale was revealing an image of Mr. Trump hugging the Empire State Building.
Weirdo.