When I told people yesterday afternoon that I planned to attend Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, they all expressed concern for my safety. “You’re going to the Nazi rally? Be careful!” I have a dusty copy somewhere on my bookshelf Under coverArmenian-American journalist Arthur Derounian’s account of his travels to the German-American Bund and other domestic fascist groups in the 1930s and ’40s. Famously, the federal government held a large rally at the old Madison Square Garden in February 1939 – hence my friends’ fears that I was putting myself in danger.

Having attended dozens of Trump rallies since 2015, I have never felt physically endangered. It is true that in 2016 some protesters were angered by the crowd – to the candidate’s apparent approval. Sometimes the staging of his events seems to come straight from Leni Riefenstahl’s script: lots of motorcycle police in shiny leather boots escort the candidate’s limousine while large vertical banners flank the stage. And reporters in the press room are often insulted by the candidates, an indignity I generally avoid by sitting in the gallery among the faithful. (On Sunday, he incited the Garden crowd to boo the “fake news.”) But the only hurt I’ve ever suffered on such occasions has been emotional – the torture of having to listen to so many lies have been repeated so often, and with such evident conviction.

Plus, after nine years, I’ve become numb to Trump’s mendacity. As for the Nazi threat, the first thing I saw when I turned the corner onto 33rd Street was a pack of young yeshivas bochers with long payable Curled up under their red MAGA hats, they watched the warm-up acts, which were livestreamed to their cell phones. The audience was significantly less diverse than at Trump’s Crotona Park rally in May – and also less confident. Back in the spring, when a rematch between Biden and Trump was looming and her husband’s victory seemingly preordained, there was a carnivalesque atmosphere. At the Republican convention, the good spirits of the delegates were even more remarkable. However, that all ended when Biden backed out in favor of Kamala Harris.

What has taken its place? There was a kind of sullen impatience outside the garden, heightened only slightly by the free T-shirts being distributed by Kalshi, the political betting site whose operation was approved by a federal appeals court just last week. (The T-shirts urging bettors to “Bet on Trump” quoted him at odds of 57 percent — but by the end of the rally, that rate had risen to 62 percent.) We were hemmed in by police barricades and took nearly three hours to extricate ourselves down 6th Avenue to the arena entrance on 7th Avenue. With Trump scheduled to begin his speech at 5 p.m., people began leaving — an exodus encouraged by the lack of any restroom facilities and the proximity of the Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit terminals at Penn Station. Eventually the police announced that the garden was full and no one else would be allowed in. At this point my strategy of blending into the crowd seemed to be a mistake and I asked for directions to the press entrance only to find that it was also closed.

So I too went home (to Brooklyn), where I turned on the TV just in time to see Vivek Ramaswamy describe New York as a “swing state.” That’s a bet I’d happily take. But if you had told me in 2020 that Tulsi Gabbard would speak at a Trump rally and describe the man as a peace candidate who urged the US to let Bibi Netanyahu “do the job in Gaza,” I wouldn’t have believed it that too. And if you had offered me a trifecta of Gabbard, RFK Jr. and Trump on the same podium, I probably would have taken that bet too.

And yet there he was, America’s favorite amateur taxidermist, peddling his obvious mix of paranoia and absurd bullshit (dipped in Kennedy charisma and served with a dash of radical rage) while looking only slightly less out of place than Dr. Phil, who gave a… touching sermon about the need to stand up to tyrants. Was Elon Musk listening? Was anyone? Most of the audience seemed taken aback, and while they dutifully applauded Kennedy’s attacks on the medical establishment, big business, and the CIA, you could tell (even though Kennedy clearly can’t) that their hearts weren’t in it.

No one can say that about Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald — the Wall Street firm that lost 658 employees on 9/11 — and chairman of Trump’s transition team. As they ran to the podium and shouted, “We must elect Donald J. Trump because we must crush jihad!” (which must have come as a shock to the Trump faithful in Hamtramck), Lutnick then began a long reverie in which He laid out his version of “Making America Great,” which called for the complete abolition of the income tax. In a less targeted media environment, Lutnick’s entire speech — which included anti-Muslim hatred, made the world safe for Wall Street billionaires to hoard their wealth, and the kind of blatant self-promotion that apparently alienated even some Trumpworld insiders — would have been appropriate received exam. Instead, he functioned primarily as Elon Musk’s second banana, a bearded Pepper Potts to Musk’s grinning Tony Stark.

After missing the obscure comedians and radio talk show hosts whose racist warm-ups made headlines, I had to console myself with Musk, Hulk Hogan, and the Trump family’s love affair (which, strangely, was broadcast live in full). PBS). As is usual at such events, the level of casual bigotry was high enough to deter the faint of heart. But the ability to believe “they’re not talking about me” has always been the price of admission for people of color at Trump events. As I stood in line behind the Hasidim, I overheard a man with an English accent and white nationalist tattoos explaining to his companion—a young Pakistani man whose red cap proclaimed “Joe and the Ho Gotta Go”—how unfair the press was to Tommy Robinson, whose… anti-Muslim rhetoric contributed to days of deadly riots in Britain this summer.

Whether Trump gets a chance to show he really means business when he says he wants to round up millions of immigrants, jail his political opponents, replace Social Security with private accounts (perhaps managed by his friends at Cantor Fitzgerald), and The Use of the military against domestic dissent is a matter that could be resolved in just over a week. I hope for all of us that we never find out.