This Saturday I will be at Madison Square Garden in New York for the climax of Donald Trump’s election campaign. It will be one hell of a spectacle, designed to show Trump returning in triumph like a conquering emperor to the city that spurned him. The hall will be filled with 20,000 Maga supporters decked in red, white and blue, roaring “USA! USA! USA!” The message will be: Trump is unstoppable. Those who are against him should get out of the way.
I have been to scores of Trump rallies. This one feels significant because of the memories and fears it evokes. In 1939, on the eve of war in Europe, 20,000 American Nazis — members of the German American Bund — gathered at the same spot in serried ranks to hail Hitler in front of huge US flags and a gigantic portrait of George Washington. On MSNBC, James Carville, the veteran Democratic spinner, accused Trump of mimicking that rally. “See what happened there,” he urged viewers. “They are telling you exactly what they’re going to do: ‘We’re going to institute a fascist regime’.”
Is this dread warning over the top? Clearly “it could happen here”, to paraphrase Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel about American fascism. According to historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen: “It is beyond doubt that Trump has provided a new stage and a new context for fascist ideologies and practices, many of which have roots in American extremist traditions and histories as well.”
After the “brat” summer and “joy” of her earlier campaign, Kamala Harris has stopped calling Trump “weird” in favour of portraying him as a dangerous and unstable threat to democracy. Initially, she was praised for dropping Joe Biden’s jaded rhetoric about saving the “soul of the nation” in favour of celebrating freedom. This was a defiant and confident message that worked. But after Trump threatened to turn the “National Guard, or … the military” on “sick people, radical Left lunatics”, her rhetoric has darkened.
“You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him,” she told Fox News.
An authoritarian cult
With the tech oligarch Elon Musk corrupting voters with $1 million-a-day prize money if they are registered to vote and sign his “free speech” and gun rights petition, half of America does seem to be relentlessly drawn towards an authoritarian cult.
Yet I wonder if Harris has made the right decision. Surely voters want to hear about the sunlit uplands that await her victory? Instead, they are watching Trump goofing around, joking about the size of golfer Arnold Palmer’s manhood and trolling Harris over her claim to have worked at McDonald’s by handing out fries at a drive-in. Challenging her to prove she worked there as a teenager is a new version of the “birther” conspiracy that plagued Barack Obama. But playing his favourite role of comedian and entertainer appears to be paying off for Trump. He has recaptured his zest for campaigning and, insofar as the tight polls can tell us, he appears to be gaining momentum.
As happened in 2020, when he surged near polling day, Trump may be upping his game too late. Many Americans have not only made up their minds, but have voted already. Yet in this final two-week stretch, there is still a chance for both camps to maximise turnout and persuade the tiny handful of “undecided” voters to side with them. The Harris campaign is concentrating its efforts on wooing the last civic-minded, Trump-resistant Republicans in swing states and thinks concerns about democracy will resonate with them.
Perhaps they will. Stumping for Harris, former congresswoman Liz Cheney said yesterday there were “millions” of Republicans ready to vote with their consciences. Harris has been ramping up her argument that “Trump’s national security adviser, two of his defence secretaries, his chief of staff, and his own vice-president are all warning America. They are saying he is unfit to serve.” She has also been quoting General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told the journalist Bob Woodward that Trump was a “fascist to the core”.
Clear and present danger
Yet for every Republican quietly voting for Harris, other groups are drifting away. There is huge concern among Democrats about Michigan, which has a large number of Muslim voters who may seek to punish the Biden-Harris administration for supporting Israel. Amer Ghalib, the mayor of Hamtramck, a suburb of Detroit, endorsed Trump this month. So did Louis Farrakhan, the 91-year-old leader of the Nation of Islam.
Just how dangerous a second Trump term would be remains moot. He has vowed to punish his enemies and has been granted immunity for his actions as president by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court. He has promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and to fire thousands of government employees. Should he win the election, there is nothing to stop him from doing as he pleases. In the current issue of The Atlantic, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Anne Applebaum warns that Trump is using the language of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini to dehumanise his opponents.
“When Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING,” Applebaum writes. At this stage in the campaign, she observes, “most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? … Because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the Thirties, they can win.”
If the Democrats are right that Trump is a clear and present danger to democracy, then it seems obvious they ought to be shouting about this from the rooftops. Trump is also preparing his supporters to reject a potential election loss. According to a report in Axios, 19 per cent of Republicans say he should declare the results invalid if Harris wins.
The trouble is, all the gloom about the future is sapping the energy of the Democrats. Trump, rather than Harris, looks like a happy warrior. This weekend’s Madison Square Garden rally will be a huge party. But it will either mark the beginning of the end of Trump or the start of a new, deeply uncertain era for America.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting and a London Standard contributing editor
