NEW YORK—And at the end of the day, all that was proven was that these people can’t even be fascists with any kind of dignity. In February 1939, with World War II having already begun at the Marco Polo Bridge two years earlier (although nobody knew it at the time) and seven months before the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, there was a famous rally in the old Madison Square Garden held in concert with the German-American Bund and the isolationist America First crowd. The latter was insignificant. It was a Nazi rally.
And what a spectacle it was. There was a thirty-foot high portrait of the birthday boy, George Washington, framed by swastikas. (“The first American fascist,” declared Bund leader Fritz Kuhn). There were drum and bugle corps. There was thunder and lightning from the podium. There were twenty-two thousand people giving the Nazi salute on cue. And as a backhanded tribute, outside the Garden, one hundred thousand counter-protesters gathered ready to throw hands against the Nazis. One of them, a plumber named Isadore Greenbaum, actually made it to the stage, interrupting Kuhn’s speech and being beaten within an inch of his life by the OD, Kuhn’s equivalent of Hitler’s SS. Greenbaum survived his mauling but got arrested for disorderly conduct. There was a sense of the epic, both inside and outside the Garden. You could feel the world turning toward darkness.
On Sunday, at the current Madison Square Garden, there was Hulk Hogan, in a pink feather boa.
There was Dr. Phil, droning on and on about how the former president* was not a bully. There was Rudy Giuliani, half out of his mind, shouting about how the Democratic ticket was “in with the terrorists,” before perhaps going backstage to ask Robert Kennedy Jr. if he could crash on his couch for a few days. There was Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, talking about the Republican respect for the rule of law while, later, the candidate himself talked about how he and Johnson “had a little secret” that he would tell us about after the election. This could be pure bluff, or it could be the opening round in a Republican attempt to ratf*ck the certification process. In either case, the former president* put Johnson on the hook for good.
In 1939, there was Fritz Kuhn, inveighing against President “Rosenfelt” and Governor Thomas “Jewey,” to thunderous applause. In 2024, there was a podcast comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe, telling the audience that there was an island of garbage floating in the ocean and it was called “Puerto Rico,” to gales of laughter, and gaining the instant infamy that is the highest form of street cred in the MAGA movement. In 1939, at the conclusion of Kuhn’s speech, twenty thousand people chanted, “Free America!” In 2024, nineteen thousand people cheered along as the soulless husk that once was Tucker Carlson told them that Kamala Harris was going to be “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”
I do not minimize the danger inherent in next Tuesday’s election. I lived through one Trump administration*. I would prefer not to have to live through the live-action adventure Trump Unchained. But Lord above, these people are not only reckless, they are comical lightweights, right up to their Dear Leader. They are burlesque authoritarians. The 1939 rally was a Wagnerian opera in a world on the brink of war. This was a grandiose version of a drive-time radio talk show where Joe on the car phone worries that his son is going to come home from third grade as his daughter. In 1939, the Garden was filled with Americans who pledged their fealty to a leader half a world away who was already building his concentration camps. This was a gathering of Americans who have been frightened by scarecrows. In Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More is grilled by Thomas Cromwell on some spurious charges and More tells Cromwell that the charges “are terrors for children, Master Secretary. Not for me.” And then he leaves, having won the argument. Of course, at the end of the play, they cut off his head.
I made a mistake. I decided not to apply for press credentials and give the former president* another chance to call me an enemy of the people. I put in for general admission seating. I wanted to be one of the folks. Of course, this led to my being deluged with emails and texts begging me for money and offering me a golden MAGA hat for my trouble. But I figured that was a small price to pay for a chance to join the gang, at least for a day, anyway. So I reported, as instructed, at noon on Sunday, to join the line to get in, which was also known as Thirty-third Street.
In three hours, we’d moved about four blocks. I had entertaining conversations with a number of the folks. I spent five or ten minutes discussing Ray Epps with a tall man standing next to me. (Ray Epps is the Arizona gardener whom the faithful believe was the FBI provocateur who prompted the violence on January 6, 2021. Epps was convicted of disorderly conduct and drew a year’s probation for his trouble, but these people never let anything go.) We were all briefly entertained by a Kim Jong-un look-alike—hey, it’s a living—who was working the sidewalk outside a clothing store. I spent a longer time chatting with Thomas and Peter, two Dubliners who were staying with Peter’s uncle in New Jersey and who flew over just to be part of the fun.
Along Thirty-third Street, there are a string of Irish-themed bars: the Celtic Rail, Stout, and Feile. The Celtic Rail sits where used to stand McAnn’s, a classic Manhattan dive bar. In 1976, a group of us who had worked for Congressman Mo Udall’s presidential campaign came down to New York for the Democratic National Convention. We couldn’t get in, of course, so we repaired to McAnn’s to watch Mo’s speech in support of nominee Jimmy Carter.
“Out on Boot Hill in Tombstone,” Mo began, “there is a grave marker that reads—‘JOHNSON—DONE HIS DAMNDEST.’ I guess that was the story of the Udall campaign. Young and old, we gave it all we had. We hit hard, but we hit fair. We talked about issues and the hard choices we face. And we had some close calls and some overtimes and our money was cut off. We had more obituaries than Lazarus…but the big blue ribbon never came. We tried to be kind and generous and we weren’t afraid to laugh at ourselves.”
Of all my political memories, that was my favorite. As I stood in the motionless crowd of people on Sunday, in front of what used to be McAnn’s, I watched as people slowly left the line and filtered into the Celtic Rail, because the other two bars, Stout and Feile, had adopted a policy to keep out any patrons wearing any kind of campaign gear. (Esquire was unable to reach management at either bar to confirm this policy.) Feile was filled up with people watching Sunday’s Formula 1 race. (How does a place become a Formula 1 bar? It is a mystery.) Brian, who was working the door, explained the no-gear policy. “It’s based on that old saying ‘Never talk politics or religion in the bar.’ ” Considering that my fellow linespeople were wearing Trump shoes, Trump flags, and one suit jacket festooned with colorful images of the former president*, to say nothing of dozens of variations on the MAGA hat, this was a sensible policy. I watched Brian politely bounce these folks.
The Celtic Rail was the only place on the block that appeared not to be adhering to a no-gear policy, and it filled up quickly with people who had given up on the line. There was a steady stream of them coming down the sidewalk away from the Garden. Finally, at about 3:30, police came down the line, telling people that the Garden was full and that nobody else would be allowed in. The line melted away like April snow. Before the former president* even spoke, the police were taking down the barriers and the biggest crowd in the area was in front of Macy’s on Thirty-fourth Street, which is all dolled up for Christmas.
The former president*’s speech was hate radio on scan. He would stick to the teleprompter that he otherwise denied he was using and then go off on familiar flights of fancy. It was mendacity surrendered to foul, endless cliché, embedded in our politics for the foreseeable future. It was in fact not the banality of evil but rather the evil of banality. The lesser of two evils is still evil.
What brought me up short, however, was the interchange between the former president* and Speaker Moses about their “little secret.” This was new. This was startling. This was a moment of authentic danger. It drew some laughs from the crowd, but it was a deeper threat than anything Fritz Kuhn threw out to his slavering crowd. For all their imperial dumbshow, the Nazis of 1939 were not the threat to the mechanisms of democracy that this one little passage in the former president*’s speech was. The wink and a nod toward the ultimate in ratf*cking was more chilling than all the “Sieg Heils” that drove Isadore Greenbaum toward the stage, Nazi goons be damned. Fritz Kuhn had all the set decoration, but the former president*, surrounded by laughable grotesques of dictatorship, has the script already written and everybody knows their part.
