Donald Trump held a big rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Oct. 27, nine days before Election Day. Here’s how Time magazine explained the event, in a piece headlined “Trump Rally at Madison Square Garden Marked by Racist and Lewd Jokes.”
Donald Trump was the headliner at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. But the more than two dozen warm-up acts showed the country a lot about the party he’s built around him.
Speaking from a podium on the arena floor that read “Trump will fix it,” comedian Tony Hinchcliffe compared Puerto Rico to an “island of garbage,” and made lewd sexual jokes about Latinos. When a Black man stood to cheer him on, Hinchcliffe said the two of them had been at a Halloween party the night before, adding “We carved watermelons together.”
A day later, Trump’s campaign disavowed Hinchcliffe’s set (even though it had almost certainly been OK’d by the campaign in advance), with a statement: “These jokes do not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” The Time article continued:
Tucker Carlson said it’s going to be hard for Trump supporters like him to believe the election results if Kamala Harris wins. He also mocked Harris—whose mother was from India and father from Jamaica—for her biracial identity, saying she would be “the first Samoan Malaysian low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected President.”
Two longtime Trump allies—Rudy Giuliani and Stephen Miller—floated false conspiracies that Democrats were behind the two recent assassination attempts against Trump. New York Republican David Rem, who has been described as a childhood friend of Trump, held up a crucifix and called Kamala Harris the “anti-Christ.” When Rem finished speaking, the crowd of Trump supporters cheered and chanted “USA, USA, USA.”
The Trump campaign has dropped all pretense, and is now promoting unfiltered hate and racism.
This New York rally—which drew more than a few comparisons to a 1939 Nazi rally at the same venue—makes the decisions by the owners of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post to overrule their editorial boards and decline to endorse Kamala Harris even more pathetic.
“Withholding support for Harris after everything that both newspapers have reported about Trump’s manifest unfitness for office looks to me like plain cowardice,” Robert Greene wrote in The Atlantic. “Although I served on the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board for 18 years, I believe one can reasonably question the value of endorsements. Still, the timing here invites speculation that these papers are preparing for a possible Trump victory by signaling a willingness to accommodate the coming administration rather than resist it. At each paper, the editorial board had readied a draft or outline of a Harris endorsement and was waiting (and waiting and waiting) for final approval. On Wednesday, the L.A. Times editorials editor, Mariel Garza, told her team, including me, that the owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, would not permit any endorsement to run. She then resigned in protest.”
The decision at The Washington Post led the nation’s two most famous journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to issue a statement slamming their alma mater.
“Under Jeff Bezos’ ownership, The Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process,” the journalists wrote.
These decisions by the owners of these two newspapers led upset readers to cancel their subscriptions—in droves. NPR reported on Oct. 28: “More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.”
I fully and completely understand the impulse to cancel subscriptions … but I humbly ask: Does anyone think these cancellations will harm or move Patrick Soon-Shiong (with a net worth of $7.5 billion) Jeff Bezos (with a net worth north of $206 billion) at all?
It won’t. But it may very well harm the hard-working reporters at those newspapers.
Caroline Kitchener, who covers abortion issues for The Washington Post, wrote eloquently on Twitter/X:
I feel lucky to work at a place that doesn’t blink when I say I need to fly to Texas to meet a woman whose life has been changed by an abortion ban. To document the impacts of Dobbs up close. I can only do that if we have subscribers who support us.
Reporters in the Post newsroom will continue to do our jobs. We will report fearlessly on whoever becomes president, and so many other things that really matter, because we are independent and care deeply about holding the powerful to account.
I completely understand if you’ve lost faith in our owner, but please, don’t lose faith in us.
We have so much work to do.
Yes, we journalists all have so much work to do—now more than ever—and we can’t do that work without reader support.