Trump Rally Slated for MSG Stirs Controversy

Say this for Donald Trump, he is no captive to conventional campaign thinking. The conventional approach for presidential campaigns in their closing days would be for the candidate to spend every waking minute in the handful of swing states where the race will be decided.

Not Trump.

First, he traveled to profoundly blue California for a rally in the Coachella Valley, and now he has invited anyone who would like to join him to a rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden in nearly as blue New York.

The idea of this rally has inflamed some Manhattanites, who have spent years stripping Trump’s name off their apartment buildings and generally seeking to distance themselves from any idea that he is one of their own.

“Let’s be clear,” said the state senator whose district includes Madison Square Garden, Brad Hoylman-Sigal, “Allowing Trump to hold an event at MSG is equivalent to the infamous Nazis Rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20,1939.”

Hoylman-Sigal said the Trump rally was a threat to public safety and demanded that the Garden cancel it. “This is a disastrous decision by Madison Square Garden,” Hoylman-Sigal said.

The Garden, owned by concert and sports impresario James Dolan, has remained silent as plans for the rally proceeded, but Hoylman-Sigal has been pilloried by the right, which of course is just the kind of firefight Trump loves to enable.

“How on earth did you get elected to office,” Trump’s one-time lawyer and America’s one-time Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, demanded of Hoylman-Sigal on X, the one-time twitter.

Hoylman-Sigal did not respond to Giuliani, or to the wave of other criticism that he had drawn an insidious false equivalency and was seeking to abrogate free expression.

“Allowing’ Trump to hold a rally?” snapped Natalya Murakhver, whose Manhattan based non-profit to “protect children from governmental overreach.”

“Last time I checked this was still a free country, even though you freaks are trying to turn us into a Soviet Socialist Republic!”

Other critics noted that Manhattan’s district attorney had tried and convicted Trump here without public incident and that “authentic Nazis” were taunting Jews on the streets of the Great City right now.

None of which answers the question of why Trump is spending a valuable campaign day in a state he has no credible chance of carrying?

Trump’s own statement was that he could, in fact, carry New York, but in the problematic style of current journalism it is accurate to append to that claim some version of the word “falsely.” Although as always with Trump it is hard to penetrate whether he understands his claim is false. Or, it just is false.

His campaign, in announcing the rally, offered a somewhat subtler (if that’s a word that can be applied to the Trump campaign) explanation for coming to New York, or California, for that matter: That Trump was entering the lion’s den of liberalism to face and slay leftist evil before it could do to America what he says it has done to New York, or California.

“New York is reeling from the harmful effects of the dangerously liberal policies championed by Kamala Harris and Democrats like Eric Adams,” The campaign said in announcing the rally.

“Additionally, thanks to Kamala’s reckless open-border policies, over 210,000 migrants have flooded into New York City since the Spring of 2022, draining vital government resources and overwhelming the city. The consequences are staggering. The influx of illegal migrants is expected to cost the city a shocking $10 billion, and it’s not just the financial burden—crime is spiraling out of control. According to local police officers, illegal immigrants are responsible for about 75 percent of arrests in midtown Manhattan.”

The campaign cited as authority for that shocking estimate of arrests a Fox News report, which itself credited a New York Post story which anonymously quoted “a midtown Manhattan police officer” who acknowledged “you can’t be 100 percent sure” because police are not allowed to ask immigration status.

Provoking alarm about immigrants is a core part of Trump’s campaign. But since he could, and does, say these things without actually being here it doesn’t fully answer why he is coming here ten days before the election.

Perhaps, he just misses New York, having exiled himself to Hurricane wracked Florida.

Or having already held an arena rally on Long Island a few weeks ago, Trump could be trying to bolster MAGA turnout in the competitive congressional races around the city–which will likely determine who controls the House of Representatives.

After all, Trump’s domination of other Republican elected officials is a defining feature of this Trump era. Ask Dick and Liz Cheney.

Or maybe, the world’s self-proclaimed smartest politician, on a mission to “Make America Great Again,” felt incomplete without a rally at the place that bills itself as “the world’s greatest arena,” which given its age (MSG not Trump) is another arguably false claim.

The event will also, no doubt, be useful for something politicians have always come to New York for: money. There were reports Trump was offering million-dollar experiences to donors. Exactly what those would be has not been shared by the campaign.

But above all there is a reality that the more improbable Trump’s campaign activities are the more he dominates news coverage, a skill set he mastered while making it here, before he made it anywhere else.

“To get really big–America Big,” the New York Times said in an admiring critique of “The Apprentice,” new movie about Trump’s New York years, “requires owning psychic real estate. You get that through notoriety, through the tabloids and, above all, through television.”

Or to say it another way, Trump is not really coming, inexplicably, to New York on the eve of an election that calls for him to be elsewhere. He is coming to the great television studio of New York to reach an electorate elsewhere that will decide who the next president will be.