The Trump campaign’s rally in New York mirrored one in the 1930s that was openly supportive of Adolf Hitler — with two dangerous differences.
The only reason you have this kind of vitriol at a campaign rally at this stage, (if ever) is to incite violence. Either because you know you’re going to lose the race, or because you need violence as a build-up to the election, including on election day.
Madison Square Garden, as speakers at Donald Trump’s Sunday night rally in the arena were eager to remind the audience, is one of the most famous venues in the world. It’s where two professional sports teams play and is a mandatory stop for tours of best-selling performers, in part because it’s trivially easy to tap into the millions of people that live in the New York City area. It literally sits on top of a train station that has lines running throughout the city, out to Long Island and over to New Jersey.
“The fact that we can pack Madison Square Garden in the heart of New York City,” Donald Trump Jr. said on Sunday, “shows me that the spirit of the American people is there” — that is, with his father, the pop star of the evening. Trump Jr. was one of about a dozen opening acts at the event, a sort of mini version of the July convention that marked the high-water mark of his father’s campaign.
But, to Trump Jr.’s point: Donald Trump got more than 85,000 votes in Manhattan alone in 2020, a figure that’s over four times the Garden’s capacity — adding an asterisk to any celebration of the full house. Even in their numerous lackluster years, the New York Knicks can pack the Garden.
New Yorkers walked by the supporters of the visiting team with practiced indifference, though some couldn’t resist taunts and barbs. One woman cruised down 33rd Street in a wheelchair, shouting about her hostility to dictators, a reminder that the stakes of what was underway in the Garden were much higher than the New York Rangers’ position in the standings.
In one sense, it’s good that the Trump rally fell into the familiar patterns of commercialism and tourism that the Garden reinforces. It meant that, while there were protesters outside and intermingled with the hundreds of Trump supporters who were leaving or had not gotten inside, the temperature was low. But it also suggested that what was underway in the arena wasn’t exceptional, that it was just another evening with another niche event. But — except for one similar event on a prior evening — the Trump event was quite exceptional indeed.
On Feb. 20, 1939, an earlier iteration of Madison Square Garden hosted a political rally that bore some striking similarities to Trump’s.
You’ve probably already heard about that 1939 event, thanks to the Academy Award-nominated short film, “A Night At The Garden.” Organized by a group called the German-American Bund, the event was ostensibly a celebration of George Washington’s 207th birthday. In reality, it was a celebration of the ascent of Germany’s Third Reich and an excoriation of the purported nefarious influence of Jewish people in the United States.
As detailed in Arnie Bernstein’s 2013 book “Swastika Nation,” the 1939 event, centered on overlaying German fascism onto American patriotism, began with the singing of the national anthem — as did Trump’s rally on Sunday (and as do many Garden events). Then and now, the arena was also bedecked in red, white and blue.
Speakers in 1939 lamented government spending, railed against Marxism and complained about how information negative to their allies was “played up and twisted to fan the flames of hate in the hearts of Americans” by the news media. Similar arguments were raised at Trump’s rally as well. “Free America!” the crowd chanted in 1939, while Trump speakers pledged that he would “save America,” with the 2024 crowd chanting “U-S-A!”
The central difference between the two rallies, of course, is that the focus of the Bund rally was on Germany’s form of government and, in particular, its hostility to Jewish people. Trump’s rally was often ostentatiously pro-Jewish, mostly by being unabashedly pro-Israel. But Sunday’s event was similarly focused on a purported threat to the nation: immigrants and foreign actors bent on tearing the country apart.
A number of speakers amplified this idea, but none more forcefully and extensively than Trump.
“It’s bigger than the economy. What they’re doing to our country, they’re allowing criminals from all over the world to enter our country,” he said during his lengthy speech. “Over the past four years, [Vice President] Kamala Harris has orchestrated the most egregious betrayal that any leader in American history has ever inflicted upon our people. She has violated her oath, eradicated our sovereign border and unleashed an army of migrant gangs who are waging a campaign of violence and terror against our citizens. There has never been anything like it anywhere in the world for any country. Kamala has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions from all around the world.”
And so on. The rhetoric is overheated and often rooted in false or debunked claims, but the focus is clear: Immigrants are upending America.
Trump pledged that “the day I take the oath of office, the migrant invasion of our country ends and the restoration of our country begins.” He asserted that “the United States is now an occupied country” and that Election Day would be known as “Liberation Day.” He insisted that “on Day One” of a second term in office, he would “launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out.”
“I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered,” he continued, “and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail and then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.”
His speech was interlaced with stories about individual attacks allegedly committed by immigrants on American citizens — usually young women and girls. Trump said that he would seek “the death penalty for any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer.”
Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller offered similarly fervent rhetoric.
“I want you to think for a minute about the decades of abuse that has been heaped upon the good people of this nation,” he said, “their jobs looted and stolen from them and shipped to Mexico, Asia and foreign countries, the lives of their loved ones ripped away from them by illegal aliens, criminal gangs and thugs who don’t belong in this country.”
This is the core of Trump’s rhetoric about tariffs, of course: insisting that he will punish America’s economic enemies. But the xenophobic arguments were mostly about the immigrants whom Trump and his allies have blamed for nearly all of America’s ills. More than one, Donald Trump Jr. included, claimed that immigrants were being intentionally brought into the country to provide votes for Democrats and to reshape the country.
“America,” Miller said at one point, “is for Americans — and Americans only.”
At the Madison Square Garden rally 85 years prior, Bund national secretary James Wheeler-Hill had insisted that the group’s mandate was “to restore America to the true Americans.”
That rally in 1939 was not greeted with the same general indifference that Trump supporters experienced in New York on Sunday. Bernstein documents the scuffles outside the arena and the apparent hostility of law enforcement officers at the scene to the goals of the Bund. This makes sense: The Bund was centered on German immigrants to America and dedicated to advocating Adolf Hitler’s policies — while insisting on not being Nazis themselves. Despite the patriotic trappings, the Bund was echoing foreign rhetoric and defending a regime that was viewed with sharp hostility by Americans.
Trump isn’t. His presentation of the threat to the United States from immigrants, foreign countries and the “enemy within” — “people who are doing such harm to our country with their open border policies,” as he said on Sunday — is offered with a patriotism untainted by overt foreign influence. And while his disparagement of immigrants has a lengthy history, it doesn’t carry the social stigma that antisemitism does. Instead of viewing Trump with skepticism, police broadly support Trump and his candidacy.
The Bund managed tens of thousands of members. Trump has tens of millions.
Bund leader Fritz Kuhn — who called Washington the “first fascist,” meaning it as praise — delivered (with a brief interruption) the final speech of the evening at the 1939 rally. He concluded by offering eight policy proposals. The first three were explicitly antisemitic. Three of the final four were:
“Immediate cessation of the dumping of all political ‘refugees’ on the shores of the United States.”
“Cessation of all abuse of the freedom of the pulpit, press, radio and stage.”
“A return of our government to the policies of George Washington: Aloofness from foreign entanglements. Severance of all connections with the League of Nations.”
Eighty-five years later, Trump spoke at the Garden and offered very similar rhetoric and proposals. He spoke on the sixth anniversary of a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, a massacre conducted by a man who blamed Jewish people for supporting unchecked immigration in an effort to reshape America.
Several speakers at Trump’s event scoffed at comparisons between it and Nazi rallies. Trump attorney Alina Habba suggested that his opponents were “scrambling” by trying to refer to her and her boss and his supporters as fascists.
From the outside, sure. The rally looked like another rock concert. From the inside? Fritz Kuhn would certainly have recognized what he saw.
