Decryption | What will Trump do at Madison Square Garden?

(New York) During the penultimate weekend of the American presidential campaign, there are several states where Kamala Harris will not set foot, including Texas and Florida. For what ? Because his chances are minimal, if not zero, of winning the electors which will go to the winner of the popular vote in these states.

Hence the question: what will Donald Trump do on Sunday, October 27, at Madison Square Garden, the famous amphitheater in New York, the megacity of the state of the same name?

“We have just rented Madison Square Garden,” announced the former Republican president during a rally held in Pennsylvania on October 9. “We will fight for New York. »

However, even Donald Trump’s most optimistic strategists – and they are very optimistic these days – do not believe in their candidate’s chances of winning the 28 electoral votes of his native state (out of a total of 270 electoral votes required for be elected to the presidency).

After all, Joe Biden led Donald Trump by 20 percentage points in 2020 in the Empire State.

So, what will Donald Trump do at the home of the Knicks and Rangers, at a time when his Democratic rival will be traveling through one or other of the seven key states in the 2024 presidential election, whose major voters will make the difference at the end? of the account?

The answer is multiple, and potentially frightening.

The dream of the Republican candidate

“Obsession”: this is the word that members of Donald Trump’s entourage use to talk about the dream that the Republican candidate has cherished since his very first presidential campaign of “filling the Garden”. A dream which he shared with journalists who followed his criminal trial in New York last April.

“We are going to organize a big gathering [au Madison Square Garden] in honor of the police, firefighters and everyone. We will honor a lot of people, including teachers, by the way,” he said.

You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, to understand that the gathering will also – or above all – aim to fill a personal need. By filling Madison Square Garden with some 20,000 of his supporters, Donald Trump will sort of thumb his nose at New York, this city which has never really accepted him, as evidenced by his decision to go into exile in Mar -a-Lago.

This city which, moreover, indicted and convicted him for a criminal case to which a porn actress gave her name and one of the most important repercussions of which was to cement his support within the Republican Party.

Nor do you need to be PT Barnum, father of the circus, to suspect that this gathering in the heart of Manhattan will attract a greater number of journalists and television cameras than yet another gathering in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

That said, Donald Trump will not be making his first trip to a state where he has no chance of winning on November 5. He recently passed through Aurora, Colorado, and the Coachella Valley, California.

Lexical field borrowed from fascime

His Aurora speech could be the prelude to the one he will give at Madison Square Garden. After falsely claiming that illegal migrants from Venezuela had “taken over” Colorado’s third-largest city, he raised the specter of an “occupied America” ​​and renewed his promise to carry out “mass expulsions” if he returns to the White House.

In New York, a city where the migrant crisis has had major repercussions since the spring of 2022, every word from Donald Trump will be scrutinized. Last week, Kamala Harris already condemned his threat to use the military to attack the “enemy within,” a group that essentially includes all of his opponents.

Political scientists and historians of fascism or totalitarianism have recalled that this expression – internal enemy – is added to others which place Donald Trump in bad company.

The Republican candidate also used the word “vermin” to talk about his political opponents. He accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of the United States.” He claimed that some of them had “bad genes”.

“They are not humans. They are animals,” he insisted.

“By using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing,” wrote journalist and historian Anne Applebaum on the magazine’s website The Atlantic. “He understands what era and what type of politics this language refers to. “I haven’t read My fight”, he declared, point blank, at a rally, thus admitting that he knows the contents of Hitler’s manifesto, whether he has read it or not. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.” »

The repetition of fascist or totalitarian rhetoric at Madison Square Garden would not fail to recall another rally held at the same place, on February 20, 1939. It was a rally held by the German-American Federation, an American Nazi organization. active in the 1930s and whose objective was to promote Nazi Germany in the United States.

“If George Washington were alive today, he would be a friend of Adolf Hitler,” declared the first speaker of the evening on a stage decorated by a huge portrait of the first American president flanked by swastika banners and American flags.

The speakers’ favorite target that evening: “job-stealing Jewish refugees.”