On Sunday night, high up in the rafters of Madison Square Garden, I watched thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters come to life as the former president finally took the stage in what would be the grand finale of his nine-year hometown election campaign for the white man A house. The MAGA Superfans around me – most of them men – had waited patiently for almost five hours. They had cheered and applauded at the mere mention of Trump’s name – some more enthusiastically than others – while a parade of warm-ups delivered hate speech with reckless abandon. Of course, they liked it when the former president denounced Kamala Harris as a “person with a very low IQ”; when he claimed that Harris personally unleashed hordes of foreign criminals, mental patients and gang members to rampage through American cities; when he said of his political opponents: “They are actually the enemy within.”

By now you’ve probably heard about the most shocking comments from the Garden rally: the comedian who joked about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of trash”; the childhood friend of Trump who called Harris “the Antichrist” while waving a crucifix in front of the audience like a medieval crusader; Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. espouse the “replacement” theory of white supremacy, which holds that Democrats want to get rid of U.S.-born Americans and put foreign people of color in their place. When Trump’s longtime adviser and chief anti-immigration ideologist Stephen Miller said, “America is for Americans and only for Americans,” did he know that this was a direct reference to the Ku Klux Klan’s “America for Americans” slogan? 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 lovefest.”

The sickening thing about being there in person was watching the Trump fans around me and realizing there was nothing shocking about it to them. Hatred was what they wanted to rejoice about; The nastier the nickname, the cruder the insult, the louder the shouting. The people around me weren’t threatening or particularly angry, but they all seemed to be engaged in the worst aspects of Trumpism – the cult of personality, the targeting of vicious insults, the demonization of entire groups of people. “Tampon Tim” and Harris’ “pimp” were not regrettable aspects of the rally, as Trump apologists in what remains of the old Republican Party establishment still claim. (See: Haley, Nikki.) They were the attraction. It’s also true that most people in the audience sat politely for hours, some of them eating popcorn or texting their friends in the dull moments. Call it the banality of evil. When Trump finally came on stage, many of those sitting next to me jumped up to take selfies – from our nosebleed seats, the backdrop was a sea of ​​red hats, the tiny figure of Trump on stage far below us and a giant screen much closer with the powerful slogan “Trump Will Fix It.”

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

Less than 48 hours later, at Harris’ week-long rally on the Ellipse Square in Washington, DC, it was the sheer size of the turnout that was awe-inspiring. Her campaign claimed that 75,000 people were in attendance, at least far more than the infamous Trump rally at the same location on January 6, 2021. If nothing else, the vice president has clearly proven that Trump is not the only candidate to attract tens of thousands of like-minded people can bring together for a series of political speeches. The mood outside the White House was a very unique mix of 2024 – part dance party, part lecture on the precarious state of democracy. The joy of summer was gone, but a happy, if nervous, energy was there. It was such an enormous crowd – that should count for something, right? As I was leaving the press area at the end of the night, I stumbled upon a tall man in a black suit. It was someone dressed as Kim Jong Un. “Enjoy the last days of democracy,” he said as I staggered toward the exit.

The contrasts to Trump’s rally in the Garden were too numerous to list – they were events that also occurred for different countries. A few differences stood out, however: one of them was Trump’s insistence on flaunting his craziness MAGA Entourage. Nine years after the start of the Trump show, he is not only marketing himself, but a whole series of characters that he has made into niche celebrities of Trumpworld – the election-denying lawyer Alina Habba, who danced her way onto the stage in a glittering dress MAGA Jacket; who as Dr. Phil, a TV host who earnestly explained to the crowd why Trump wasn’t actually a bully, but was being bullied himself. Tellingly, the key speaking slots just before Trump’s inauguration were not reserved for Trump’s Vice President JD Vance or the current highest-ranking Republican in the administration, Speaker Mike Johnson, but for Trump’s favored family members and two of his biggest billionaire supporters.

Harris, for her part, eschewed the star power that has been a feature of many of her other rallies — there was no Beyoncé or Bruce Springsteen to divert attention from what was billed as a “closing argument,” a speech that seemed tendentious about the election as a choice between Trump and his “enemies list” and Harris and her “to-do list.” In fact, much of the speech consisted of her going through the items on that list — a series of policy proposals vetted through surveys, focus groups and experts, ranging from a federal ban on price gouging at grocery stores to financial assistance for first-time buyers of one Home ownership and Medicare coverage for senior home care.

In theory, that’s what her critics have been pushing for — more detail, more policy, more sense of what a Harris presidency would do. It was sensible, rational, sober and, in the age of Trump, an almost unbelievable anachronism. The scoundrel from New York has spent three consecutive elections exploding the norms that once governed American politics, including even adherence to basic constitutional principles. As I listened to Harris’ speech, I thought about what she was dealing with. It’s T. Rex vs. the Technocrats, Godzilla vs. the G-Men. You don’t have to be a fan of monster movies to know that the monster wins very often.

As I was leaving the Harris rally, I heard about Joe Biden’s own “trash” gaffe, in which the president, in a video call with Latino Harris supporters, either insulted the Trump “supporter’s” attack on Puerto Rico as “trash” or The label “trash” was applied to all “supporters” of Trump. Biden and Harris and every other Democrat on the planet who was asked about it apologized, insisting that no blanket insult was intended and that it was all an inappropriate apostrophe. Trump, on the other hand, immediately took Biden’s remark as something akin to a blood libel against his voters by the octogenarian president he would most like to run against. Not to mention that just days earlier, Trump himself had called America under Biden and Harris a “garbage dump for the world.” Not to mention that he had refused to apologize for the “Island of Trash” comment at his Madison Square Garden rally the two days before.

By Wednesday, his staff had found a garbage truck for Trump to ride in to draw more attention to Biden’s comment, though of course it also served as a reminder of Trump’s own garbage-filled final act. With just days to go in a race that is as close as it gets, the video of the ex-president pointlessly circling an empty airport runway in a garbage truck provided an almost irresistible, if unintentional, metaphor for an election campaign – and a country – that is 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 neon garbage man vest his campaign advisers had asked him to wear. But he did it anyway. What was striking, however, was that even Trump himself seemed to realize that this might not have been the best idea. And he was right. Check out the video of him struggling to open the garbage truck door – not a great look for a 78-year-old trying to become the oldest person ever elected president. The resulting photo op could go down in history with Michael Dukakis riding around in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet or Calvin Coolidge uncomfortably wearing a Native American headdress. This also seems to me to be another unintentional Trump metaphor: America, like its former president, knows better, but it could still do the wrong thing. ♦