Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
Yvette Figueroa and Carlos Figueroa, both Puerto Ricans, protest in support of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris outside a campaign rally held by former President Donald Trump, at the PPL Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, October 29, 2024.
Going into Sunday’s rally at Madison Square Garden, the Trump campaign took understandable umbrage at the comparisons that were made to the German American Bund’s pro-Nazi rally at the Garden in early 1939.
By the end of Trump’s own Garden rally, those comparisons didn’t seem quite so far-fetched.
Perhaps the best evaluation of the rally came from the Trump campaign’s own spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, who said in a post-rally interview on Fox News that comic Tony Hinchcliffe’s terming Puerto Rico an “island of garbage” didn’t represent Trump’s viewpoint, but, she added, the crowd “didn’t mind.”
Nor, apparently, did they mind when another rally speaker referred to Kamala Harris’s aides as “pimp handlers,” or a third called every Democrat “a bunch of degenerates” and “lowlives … every one of them.”
That, of course, didn’t mean MAGA faithful were Nazis. Then again, the 1939 rally of the Hitler acolytes preceded the Nazis starting World War II and killing six million Jews, among others: We can’t assume that all the attendees at that earlier rally would have supported the Holocaust per se. We can conclude, however, that they were all ragingly antisemitic and inclined to demonize the Nazis’ opponents. Just as we can also conclude that the MAGAnauts at the Garden on Sunday were similarly inclined to demonize those who disagree with them and “didn’t mind” when that demonization, or dehumanization, was extended to nonwhite races. After all, it’s Trump himself who has repeatedly referred to nonwhite immigrants as “vermin” who degrade Americans’ bloodstream, terminology the Nazis used to describe Jews and other non-Aryans.
But 1939 isn’t the only point of comparison to Sunday’s rally; there’s also 1884. In that year’s presidential campaign, a close-run affair between Republican James G. Blaine and Democrat Grover Cleveland, calumny and bigotry also featured prominently. Shortly before Election Day, Blaine spoke at a rally of leading Protestant clergymen at New York’s premier restaurant, Delmonico’s. At that rally, too, one of the warm-up speakers, the Rev. Samuel Burchard, proclaimed, “We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag; we are loyal to you.” “Romanism,” in case you’re wondering, meant Catholicism.
The “you” to whom the Republicans were loyal was their native-born Protestant base, who generally feared and loathed the Catholic immigrants (at that time, chiefly Irish and German) who presumably drank liquor and threatened rebellion, or at least, union activism and strikes.
Blaine did not repudiate the minister’s remarks, just as Trump has refused to comment on Hinchcliffe’s characterization, choosing rather to refer to his Garden rally as a “lovefest.” And just as Democrats today have seized on Hinchcliffe’s equation of Puerto Ricans with garbage as a way to bring more Latino voters to their column, so Democrats in 1884 seized on Burchard’s bigotry to bring more Catholic voters, not to mention any stray tolerant Protestants, to the polls.
Cleveland was no great shakes, but he won, and that flagrant display of Republican bigotry certainly played a role in that. A latter-day version of that bigotry, which Trump has personally infused with neofascist echoes of 1939, defines MAGA Republicanism today. May he follow Blaine and those Swastika brandishers into history’s trash heap.
