I went to the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Or I tried to. I wanted to see it, to feel it, to know it. I spent two hours smushed in a crowd of thousands, waiting in the cold, unable to move, in the midst of belligerent conversations, alcohol consumption, rantings and racist posturings. There were older Jewish men, Black families, Asian couples and young Latina women. I heard south Asian men calling Kamala Harris hateful slurs, others saying women needed to just shut up and listen to men. I saw working men showing off their jackets with artistic renderings of Trump as bullfighter slaying the deep state dragon. What I mainly heard and felt was grievance.
I’ve always thought America was a mean place. And what I mean by that is that it’s structured for meanness. It’s a place of winners and losers, people who matter and those who can be disposed of, a country built on violent theft of Indigenous lands and hundreds of years of enslavement of millions of Black people. It’s a place where when a person rises in status, they show it off to those who have less, rather than bringing them along. Where the rich and famous flaunt their wealth and clothes and fabulous lives every single day, and watching is a national past time. A place where most people get lost or abandoned, forgotten or judged. Where an ambitious few can turn that suffering into gold, but most get swallowed in self-hatred and despair.
We’re almost 250 years into this American experience and I would say the one common thing that this patriarchal racist capitalism has wrought is a primal insecurity that what you have can easily be taken away and who you are can be suddenly and forever erased.
And that insecurity is the rub.
For when fascists come, when those narcissistic tyrannical daddy figures arrive looking bigger than life, they instinctively know how to manipulate that insecurity. They usually do it by creating a class of people or a group of people who are less, who are othered, making the majority feel special, superior and safe. It’s the oldest, but most effective trick in the fascist handbook. Externalize the abstract self-hatred and insecurity, turn it into a real enemy and blame everything on them.
This demonization was over the top at Madison Square Garden. Whether it was a comedian talking about Puerto Rico “as a floating island of garbage” or suggesting Jews were cheap and Palestinians were rock throwers, or Tucker Carlson deriding Harris – the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father – with a made-up identity saying she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor to ever be elected president”. Or for that matter almost every speaker mispronouncing Kamala’s name.
Then there was Trump rambling on and on for almost an hour, calling those seeking refuge and survival savages, animals, horrible people occupying America, invading it, as if he’d forgotten that except for the Indigenous people who were here and the African Americans who were dragged here in chains, every single other person is an immigrant who came in search of survival, safety and a new life.
I’ve always somehow understood the banal evil of Donald Trump. It goes back as far as 1989. That was around the time he was turning a 14-story apartment building in New York City into luxury condos for the rich, attempting to force tenants out of the building by turning off hot water and heat in the middle of winter. We organized an event called Brunch at the Plaza and invited Trump, who at the time owned the hotel. We bussed in hundreds of homeless people and served them brunch on the Plaza lawn. The demand was simple. Give 1.3% of your net income to specific organizations developing housing for the poor. Trump did not attend. Cut to 2015. Months before he declared he was running for office, with a few activists, we invited people to my apartment to see if we could launch Stop Hate Dump Trump. A campaign to stop him from getting traction running for president. Many told us we were crazy and extreme, they told us that no one would ever take that buffoon seriously.
Perhaps my own childhood with that same kind of narcissistic, abusive, seductive father was what gave me eyes to see Donald Trump, to understand that he was not necessarily dangerous in what he was (if you emptied that piggy bank nothing would be inside), he was dangerous for what he wasn’t – a shiny American hologram, an all too familiar dream or daddy just out of reach, totally disassociated except when he suddenly exploded with disappointment and rage. This daddy has come home indeed, home to roost, home to turn the house into chaos and terror, home to compare his children with one another so there’s always someone on top and someone stuck on the bottom, creating violent competition and hatred among his children so they never learn cooperation and solidarity, but fight instead with each other for his approval.
All night long Trump’s surrogates spun us into an opposite world. They spoke of Trump as a man of peace and love, you know, one of the flawed ordinary people like most of us, an endless victim who has survived lawsuits and impeachment, being thrown off Twitter with no mention of a reason why any of this might have happened. Truth that night was as dispensable as the lives of immigrants, pregnant women, trans kids, critical race theory and our nation’s history.
There’s plenty of blame to go around for how we got here. A racist colonialist history that has never been reckoned with, the Democrats settling for the most rudimentary approach to identity politics rather than seeing it as an entryway to an intersectional analysis of race and class. The list goes on.
We are a nation of the lonely and abandoned, desperate for belonging and worth. Many have been seduced by Trump. They can’t believe this rich mogul and TV celebrity would actually care about them. And they’re right because there is absolutely no indication that he would ever invite most of the people in the New York crowd to his mansion or golf club. Remember reports of him talking of his followers as “basement dwellers”. He told the packed house on Sunday night that he could be sunning himself on the beach or playing golf at Turnberry in Scotland, but he chose to be there with them as if the act of running for president was the highest form of altruism and not a total power grab. Oh dear generous daddy.
But there’s always the real story lurking on the edges, always the corruption and theft and dirty deals, always the sexual violence. A man told a woman I was with that she didn’t look like a typical Trump type. She was an older woman, he said, and most older women don’t like Trump. My friend asked him why he thought that was and he said something about it having to do with sexuality and my friend asked: “You mean because Trump’s a rapist?”
But in a land of mirages and heroin dreams, he’s the daddy projection screen. Terror and protector. Killer and fixer. Longed-for object and rapist. In the end thousands of us didn’t get into the Garden. In hindsight I realize I wouldn’t have lasted a minute before getting found out. I wouldn’t have been able to handle the metastasized energy of a nationalistic, racist, misogynist mob in service of its daddy lord.
As we walked away, Rudy Giuliani, a major felon and disgrace, barking madness on the jumbotron, a young woman doing an enthusiastic cheerleading act for “daddy Don” with red pompoms, I know more deeply than ever that it’s not enough to get rid of Trump, although that will be a very good thing. We have to devote ourselves to changing the conditions that gave birth to him.