Garbage time at the 2024 finish line

On Sunday night, high in the rafters of Madison Square Garden, I watched thousands of Donald Trump supporters come to life as the former president finally took the stage in what was supposed to be the big hometown finale of his nine. year’s campaign for the White House. The STOMACH superfans around me – most of them men – had been waiting patiently for almost five hours. They had cheered at the mere mention of Trump’s name and clapped — some more enthusiastically than others — as a parade of warm-up acts hurling hate speech with reckless abandon. Naturally, they loved it when the former president slammed Kamala Harris as a “very low IQ individual”; when he claimed that Harris had personally unleashed hordes of foreign criminals, mental patients and gang members to rampage through American cities; when he said of his political opponents, “they really are the enemy within.”

By now, you’ve surely heard about the most shocking comments from the convention at the Garden: the comic who joked about Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”; Trump’s childhood friend who called Harris the “Antichrist” while brandishing a crucifix in front of the crowd like a medieval crusader; Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, Jr., are promoting the white-supremacy “replacement” theory that claims Democrats want to get rid of Native Americans and put foreign people of color in their place. When Trump’s longtime adviser and chief anti-immigration ideologue, Stephen Miller, said, “America is for Americans and Americans only,” did he know that was a direct echo of the Ku Klux Klan’s slogan “America for Americans”? Or the Nazis’ “Germany for the Germans”? It didn’t seem like a question that needed to be asked – it had already been answered. I can assure you that the night was not, as Trump tried to claim a few days later, “an absolute love fest.”

What was sick about being there in person was seeing Trump fans around me and realizing there was nothing shocking about it to them. Hatred was what they were there to cheer; the more disgusting the nickname, the more crude, the bigger the roar. The people around me weren’t threatening or particularly angry, but they were all, it turned out, the worst aspects of Trumpism—the cult of personality, the calculated hurling of vicious insults, the demonization of whole groups of people. “Tampon Tim” and Harris’ “pimp dealers” were not deplorable aspects of the meeting, as Trump apologists, in what’s left of the Republican Party’s old establishment, still pretend. (See: Haley, Nikki.) They were the attraction. It’s also true that most people in the audience sat politely for hours, some of them munching on popcorn or texting their friends during the dull periods. Call it the banality of evil. When Trump finally took the stage, many of those sitting near me jumped up to take selfies—from our nosebleed seats, the backdrop was a sea of ​​red hats, the small figure of Trump on the stage far below us, and a giant screen much closer. off with the strongman slogan “Trump Will Fix It.”

And yet, afterward, I found myself strangely optimistic for a few hours at least — maybe it’s just too hard to believe that this dark, narrow, hateful vision of America is actually shared by a majority of Americans. I had a similar feeling at the end of the GOP convention in Milwaukee this summer: his Trumpified Republican Party feels too much like a religion that requires excessive suspension of disbelief from its adherents.

Less than forty-eight hours later, at Harris’ week-long convention out at the Ellipse in Washington, DC, it was just the size of the turnout that impressed. Her campaign claimed seventy-five thousand people attended, far more, in any case, than the infamous Trump rally at the same venue on January 6, 2021. If nothing else, the vice president has proven definitively that Trump is not the only candidate who can gather tens of thousands of like-minded people for a lot of political speeches. The atmosphere in front of the White House was its own unique mix from 2024 – part dance party, part lecture on the peerless state of democracy. The joy of summer was gone, but there was a happy, if nervous, energy. It was such a huge crowd – that should count for something, right? As I left the press area at the end of the night, I bumped into a large man in a black suit. It was someone who was dressed like Kim Jong Un. “Enjoy the last days of democracy,” he said as I trudged on towards the exit.

The contrasts with Trump’s rally at the Garden were too numerous to mention – these were events for what might as well be different countries. A few differences stood out, however: one was Trump’s insistence on stomping out all his weirdness STOMACH follow. Nine years into the Trump show, he’s marketing not just himself, but a whole carnival of characters he’s turned into niche Trumpworld celebrities—the election-denying lawyer, Alina Habba, who exuberantly danced her way onstage in a bouncy STOMACH jacket; the TV host known as Dr. Phil, who passionately explained to the audience why Trump was not really a bully, but was bullied himself. Tellingly, the key speaking slots just before Trump entered were not reserved for Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, or the most senior Republican currently in the administration, Speaker Mike Johnson, but for Trump’s favored family members and two of his biggest billionaire backers. .

Harris, for her part, skipped the star power that has been a hallmark of many of her other rallies — there was no Beyoncé or Bruce Springsteen to draw attention away from what had been dubbed a “closing argument” speech, an address that poured hard on framing the election as a choice between Trump and his “enemies list” versus Harris and her “to-do list.” Indeed, much of the speech consisted of her ticking off the items on this list—a poll-tested, focus-group, expert-endorsed set of policy proposals ranging from a federal ban on grocery prices to financial assistance for first-time homebuyers and Medicare coverage for elderly care at home.

This, in theory, is what her critics have been pushing for — more detail, more politics, more of a sense of what a Harris presidency would do. It was reasonable, rational, sober and, in the age of Trump, an almost incredible anachronism. The scoundrel from New York has spent three consecutive elections blasting the norms that once governed American politics, including, even, an adherence to basic constitutional principles. As I listened to Harris’ speech, I thought about what she’s up against. It’s T. rex against the technocrats, Godzilla against the G-men. You don’t have to be a monster movie aficionado to know that the monster very often wins.

As I left the Harris rally, word came of Joe Biden’s own “garbage” gaffe, in which the president, on a video call with Latino Harris supporters, either insulted Trump’s “supporters'” attack on Puerto Rico as “garbage” or used “garbage” -label for all Trump “supporters”. Biden and Harris and every other Democrat on the planet who was asked about it apologized and insisted that no general offense was intended and that it was all a matter of a misplaced apostrophe. Trump, meanwhile, immediately seized on Biden’s remark as something close to a blood libel by his constituents on the octogenarian president he would have much preferred to run against. Don’t forget that just days earlier Trump himself had called America under Biden and Harris a “dumping ground for the world.” Never mind that he had spent the previous two days refusing to apologize for the “garbage island” comment at his Madison Square Garden rally.

By Wednesday, his staff had found a garbage truck for Trump to ride in to draw further attention to Biden’s comment, though of course it also served as a reminder of Trump’s own garbage-filled closing act. With just days left in a race that is the closest of tossups, the video of the former president pointlessly circling an empty airport runway in a garbage truck provided an almost irresistible, if unintentional, metaphor for a campaign—and a country—stuck in an endless Trump loop.

On stage at a rally in Wisconsin shortly after the stunt, Trump admitted he didn’t want to wear the garbageman neon vest his campaign advisers had insisted he don. But he did it anyway. What was striking, however, was how even Trump himself seemed to realize that this might not be the best idea. And he was right. Watch the video of him fighting opening the garbage truck door—not a good look for a seventy-eight-year-old seeking to become the oldest person ever elected president. The resulting photo shoot may go down in history with Michael Dukakis riding around in a tank in an ill-fitting helmet, or Calvin Coolidge uncomfortably wearing a Native American headdress. This, too, strikes me as another unintentional Trump metaphor: America, like its former president, knows better, but it just might do the wrong thing anyway.