I Was at Trump’s NYC Rally This Weekend. It Clarified Something Big for Me.

The last time I attended a Donald Trump rally was in 2016, right after he won the election, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. This was back when readers and journalists alike were trying to make sense of what a Trump presidency would look like, hoping that his perfervid crowd could clarify the chilling truth we already knew lay within: It was going to be bad.

In Hershey, I remember the feeling like someone was dribbling ice water down my back: This was a crowd gleeful about the harm that could befall me and my friends. They weren’t shy, and there was no dog whistle needed. I was in a sea of people who were proud of their ideological deformities.

When Trump and his acolytes descended on Madison Square Garden in midtown Manhattan this Sunday, there was little left to learn about our once-again maybe-president. Nothing feels new anymore. In fact, everything has felt redundantly moribund since 2016, ever since we started thinking so much about campaign rallies like this in the first place. It used to be that a politician held a handful of these kinds of events all across the country, and maybe only a few became newsworthy thanks to a specific gaffe, like Howard Dean yeehawing so hard that he lost the candidacy. For the past eight years, however, Trump rallies have delivered the same arc, the same attendees, the same energy. There have of course been aberrations, like when an attendee died and when Trump was nearly assassinated. But otherwise, it’s been more and more and more of the same. Trump has turned these events into a kind of blood sport, or at least a visual representation of what makes his renewed rise to power so grim in the first place. People are there to feel good about their anger.

On Sunday, nearly 20,000 people filled Madison Square Garden to capacity, with several thousand more outside. Inside, speakers like Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump Jr., and Phil McGraw cosigned another Trump presidency; outside, MAGA supporters created their own minirally, not too dissimilar from the angry, imprecise vitriol that came from within. A comedian you’ve never heard of before called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage,” another speaker said Harris and her “pimp handlers” will destroy the country, and Trump said he would let Kennedy, a vaccine denialist who had a worm in his brain, “go wild on medicines” if he’s elected in just over a week.

Outside it was just as bad, offering the same tired routine of every Trump rally before it. Local vendors were selling their finest Trump merchandise, all entirely unaffiliated with the candidate. My favorite was a shirt with a stiletto heel awash in the American flag with “Give Up” printed underneath. (Give up what? Wearing heels? Sure!) “Don’t be a Democrat,” one retailer sang from his folding table, “buy a MAGA hat!”

The attendees, too, fill the same archetypes they always have. There are the middle-aged white men, Trump’s bread and butter, who spent much of the afternoon repeating sexist rhetoric about “Tampon Tim” or how Harris can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes while she goes through menopause. There were young, beautiful white women in pink “Make America Sexxxy” hats, lips plumped to the point of perma-puckering. There were more people of color than you could ever expect. Bible-thumpers, anti-communists, NRA members; a woman rocked her daughter side to side, holding an anti-Harris sign, while the crowd chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” It would be fair to feel shocked, but not to feel surprised.

Moving through the crowd, you might have caught slivers of the endless fights happening between Trump supporters and the left-leaning activists who had come out to rebuke them, or even just random passersby, incensed by what they were walking into. “Then why did his daughter marry a Jew?” a man in a freshly purchased MAGA hat asked a couple who stopped their midday stroll to argue about whether Trump was antisemitic. Another man tapped his friend on the shoulder and pointed across the street: “There’s a guy in the counterprotest who looks just like Kim Jong-un.” Two people gesticulated at each other wildly in the middle of an intersection, one yelling at the other, “You have Trump derangement syndrome!” While the line to get in wrapped around the block, a man trailed it to remind us that “Camilla Harris is a chameleon.” (His pronunciation, not mine.) There were arguments about which God is the one true God, about where heaven may be, about who’s going to actually lower the tax rate for the middle class. I kept tripping over a man carrying a large wooden cross. Or, rather, he was dragging the cross on a wheel, which offended me largely because he wasn’t doing the Christlike physical penance he was advertising. At least get some kind of stigmata going.

Over at the modestly sized counterprotest across the street on the steps of Moynihan Train Hall, a few teenage girls joined in with homemade signs. “Do you guys want a RAPIST?” a woman in her 40s asked them, handing them a few placards with Trump’s beet-red screaming face, and the word rapist in all caps. They accepted, and everyone laughed for a second, the nervous laugh of I can’t believe we’re still doing this shit. The Women’s March in 2017, once the largest single day of protest in American history, would have happened when these girls were still in elementary school; now they were being handed a baton that we all hoped wouldn’t be needed anymore.

Red MAGA hats half-heartedly confronted the counterprotest by yelling “Triggered!” and “Safe space!,” as if wanting peace from harmful rhetoric was some kind of burn. A man with MAGA tattooed across his forearm held up a fist. “You’re all going to be crying, and Trump will make America great again!” This was delivered simultaneously as a prophecy and as a brag: it’s clear that the point of Trump’s election is to make a wide subsect of the population feel very unhappy, and very unsafe. Another man walked by with a flag of the Benjamin Franklin “Join, or Die” snake. This was once a message about joining together in solidarity against the French; now it felt like a threat delivered from half of the country to the other.

This particular Trump rally has been compared by many, including vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, to another one that happened at MSG in February 1939, when the German American Bund held a “Pro American Rally.” The Bund, supportive of Hitler and the push toward fascism in Europe, also had a charismatic leader prosecuted for misappropriating funds and a national secretary eventually convicted of perjury. As ever, what’s old is new again, in a way that manages to be both boring and undeniably spooky.

What did the people of New York do in 1939 when the Nazi sympathizers descended on midtown? Not much. When the New York Times wrote about the “22,000 Nazis” holding a rally in the garden, most of the story was about the 1,700 police officers deployed to maintain order. “The Garden was decorated with American flags, a thirty-foot picture of George Washington behind the speakers’ stand, Bund flags and many banners, most of them derogatory to the Jews.” The venue’s booking manager said that MSG was rented to the Bund on the condition that there be “no anti-Semitism either in banners or speeches,” but there were no consequences for flouting that sole condition. In 2024 we still don’t have a better idea of how to punish racist or sexist rhetoric as delivered from one of the most famous arenas in the country. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, currently under indictment himself, tweeted, “The hateful words that were used by some at today’s rally at Madison Square Garden were completely unacceptable.” There were still no consequences.

“We have enough police here to stop a revolution,” the then police commissioner told the Times in 1939. In 2024 cops leaned over the barricades to chat with pro-Trumpers, sharing Instagram handles and chitchat about how nice the weather was. That much was true: It was unseasonably warm for late October, and I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with that.

Since Trump’s first election, and since every catastrophic event since, we’ve collectively sought clarity by looking back at moments of civil unrest and how we’ve lived and reacted through them. What did we do during World War II? Or during public lynchings? How did we react to Ruby Bridges walking to school? What did we do in 1939, when the Nazis came to Madison Square Garden, the same year that the Arab Revolt against British colonialism in Palestine ended?

Games of hindsight are often a waste of time, but we already know what we would have done back then, because we were still doing it on a sunny fall Sunday in October. We’ve done it through every cataclysmic revolution, every war, every clash between social progressives and conservative devotees. Some of it involves protest, some involves the allocation of funds to charities or activist organizations, yes. But so much of it still involves nothing: doing nothing, feeling nothing, going nowhere. We witness history as it happens and hope that there’s new information to glean from it, as if it can tell us how to better fight the same fight this time. But there’s nothing new here. We are committed to the same resistance, the same mistakes, and, in many ways, the same enemies.

So what did I do during this particular fascist takeover of America? Pretty much what I usually do. I walked through midtown and thought about my grocery list—do I have chickpeas at home? I got my period and asked a woman in the train station for a tampon. I called my mom and talked to her about her knee; it’s been bothering her. I thought about someone I liked who didn’t like me back, then was snapped back to reality by a man holding a megaphone screaming “Kamala can suck my dick!,” which helped remind me that no man is worth even a crush. I sat on a stoop a block away from the protests, feeling despairing, and looked at photos of my friend’s kid on Instagram. She was dressed up as a cat. Very cute.

Other people kept going about their business too. In Times Square, a couple argued with a moody Minnie Mouse over payment for a photo. Tourists stared at their phones, lost, trying to find the R train. Above Eighth Avenue, where the MAGA protesters were filling the streets, I watched a group of adults take an art class. In lower Manhattan, there was a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest. In Bryant Park, close to the very, very, very small DSA counterprotest, the Winter Village persisted; people bought overpriced cocoa and mittens and little fucking wooden things to put on your desk and forget about forever. A few Trump supporters tried to disrupt the DSA members, but no one seemed to notice—a red cap in the wild is too commonplace to react to anymore.

There’s nothing left to learn from these rallies. What data can I collect from a gaggle of young men, activated and cheerful and angry, screaming “Kamala is a whore!” anymore?

Even if he loses next week, events like these and supporters like these won’t go away. When the Bund disbanded in 1940, it didn’t mean that American support for Nazi ideals vanished; it just meant that the leaders of the group kept getting in legal trouble. For a while, maybe, it was unpopular to be that kind of racist. But political events are just life events, and they happen on a cycle. Our defiance of them does too. We get closer to progress, but not like a direct line, and maybe more like a helix. No wonder it feels so circular; no wonder we’re so tired of doing the same things.

Life goes on. Fascism bleeds into a venue better known for hosting the Knicks, but you still have to get your kid a Halloween costume. You still have to stand in line at CVS for ointment. You still catch a glimpse of your reflection in a bus and think, “Should I get bangs?” (You still should not.) In 1939 we found mundanity in the fear too: The Times story about the Bund ran next to an ad for the “sportswoman’s indispensable” double-breasted coat with pearl buttons. Your TikTok Shop has some fall fashion for you to consider too. There’s always a cognitive dissonance through our dystopias; how else would we survive them?

The only surety we have about our post–Election Day world is that it’ll be something that’s already happened before. It’ll feel the same, I bet, even while we hope it feels different, a new despair shaped like the ones before. The improvements will always feel small compared with the stagnation. The progress will always feel slow compared with the destruction. The Times reported on the Nazis in 1939, breathless about this effort to bring fascism closer to the United States; in 2020 it published an op-ed from a senator recommending that the government turn its army against its own people when they protest. Billionaire owners of newspapers are blocking political endorsements from their own properties. It takes longer to build something than it does to blow it up. Those teenagers getting a “rapist” sign from their elder will do the same work that women before them have been doing for generations. It’s exhausting indeed that this is the third fucking time we have to do this, but don’t think too hard about it, because there might be a fourth, or a fifth. When Trump dies, there will likely be someone a lot like him ready to take his place. We will always be here, trying, but so will everyone else, in their own efforts to make that growth so much harder.

I took the 3 train home after the rally. Who in 1939 took the 3 train home? I wondered. Who will ask me what I did in 2024? I went back to my little apartment, where I live my little life, where I hold my little hopes. I lit some candles. I made some tea. I felt as if I were doing what someone else did, and has done, through every single revolutionary cycle. The horrors persist; the mundanity of it keeps us moving.