The more I think about it, the more I’m worried about Donald Trump’s plan to deliver his closing campaign message in a rally at Madison Square Garden this Sunday. As Sidney Blumenthal wrote in the Guardian,
Trump’s rally, through the rhyme of history, will be a rebuke to the greatest campaign speech delivered by Franklin D Roosevelt, which, though given 88 years ago in the Garden on 31 October 1936, rings remarkably contemporary, a speech for “the restoration of American democracy” and its “preservation”…
Here’s a clip from that speech, (“I welcome their hatred”) and here’s a transcript of the speech that begins,
On the eve of a national election, it is well for us to stop for a moment and analyze calmly and without prejudice the effect on our Nation of a victory by either of the major political parties.
Sidney Blumenthal picks up the story:
Three years after FDR spoke at the Garden, another rally was held there, on 20 February 1939, under the sponsorship of the German American Bund, raising the slogan of “America First”, to advance the great replacement theory that Jews and other “inferior races” were displacing white Aryans. The Nazis claimed the mantle of true Americanism and Christian nationalism. Swastikas framed a gigantic portrait of George Washington as the backdrop to the stage. From the balcony hung a banner: “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America.” “Wake up!” shouted the Führer of the Bund, Fritz Kuhn, “you, Aryan, Nordic and Christians, to demand that our government be returned to the people who founded it!”
Now,
writes in “A Night At the Garden, An Election for the Ages”,This Sunday night, Donald Trump intends to recreate one of the ugliest nights in the history of New York City.
Trump has wanted to hold his own fascist rally there three different times in the past few years. Now it’s going to happen at the end of a week where we learned how much Trump loved Hitler’s generals, how our generals who served under Trump believed him to be a “fascist to the core” — and even our soon-to-be new President insisting this week Trump is, indeed, a “fascist.”
Michael Moore shared the documentary filmmaker Marshall Curry made about that 1939 rally called “A Night at The Garden”. It was nominated in 2019 for an Academy Award. It can’t happen here?
Moore goes on to say,
Trump is the gift that keeps on giving as he actively tries to tank his own campaign. Yet the press would have us believe it’s still a “neck-and-neck race,” “a virtual tie,” “coming right down to the wire.” They keep saying this is a “50-50 country.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Too many of us have bought into this misreading of our nation’s political leanings. Which has led to many of you fearing the outcome of November 5th, weeks of anxiety, desperation and a sick pit in the stomach that we may be facing four more years of The Nutter.
I couldn’t agree more.
I’ve been sleeping peacefully—well relatively—in my bubble of confidence about how Kamala Harris is doing in the Seven States That Matter. But readers of this newsletter who live in places like Mississippi, West Virginia or other parts of Trump Country tell me they’re freaking out.
That sick pit in the stomach Michael Moore describes is based on the gut punch we felt when Trump won in 2016, how awful his presidency was, and how clear it is that he’d be even worse next time.
But I bet
agrees with me that 2016 was not a measure of the power of Trump’s base—which fizzled in 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023—but rather due to Hillary’s failure to campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin, and the number of people who felt safe not voting for her because they knew she was going to win anyway.They won’t be staying home or voting for Jill Stein this year.
I liked the way Peter Baker began his lengthy overview of Trump’s troubles, “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment.”
When the history of the 2024 election is written, one of the iconic images illustrating it will surely be the mug shot taken of Donald J. Trump after one of his four indictments, staring into the camera with his signature glare. It is an image not of shame but of defiance, the image of a man who would be a convicted felon before Election Day and yet possibly president of the United States again afterward.
Sometimes lost amid all the shouting of a high-octane campaign heading into its final couple of weeks is that simple if mind-bending fact. America for the first time in its history may send a criminal to the Oval Office and entrust him with the nuclear codes. What would once have been automatically disqualifying barely seems to slow Mr. Trump down in his comeback march for a second term that he says will be devoted to “retribution.”
Gauging how poll data, or any measure, in this election compares to past campaigns is like that Steve Martin routine I linked to the other day about forgetting things like the time the Earth blew up.
That “simple if mind-bending fact” of a convicted felon, Hitler-admiring, dementia-suffering candidate kind of overshadows every other benchmark or point of reference. We might as well be asking, “Besides that comet hitting the planet, how was your day?”
I’ll go back to looking at those Seven States—and stories about how pathetic the Trump ground game is—and not obsess over the polls. There’s only one candidate who has a chance to win all seven—and it isn’t Donald Trump.
In a recent edition of “Mike’s Mailbag” Michael Moore shared some of his readers’ thoughts about how to talk to non-voters about the importance of voting in this election. Moore writes, “My challenge to all of us is simple: Reach out to 3 people you know who are usually not active voters — and often “Non-Voters” — and get them to vote, even if it’s just this once.”
That’s a good strategy, but as I often remind my readers,
The U.S. has one of the lowest rates of youth voter turnout in the world. Before the 2022 election, 40% of Gen Z voters told Harvard’s Institute of Politics that they intended to vote. The actual turnout was 23%.
But voters over 65 are always the largest share. Seventy-six percent of them came out to vote in 2020. They’re the ones electing officials who won’t vote for gun safety, health care, voting rights, the environment, gender equality and racial justice, and all the other issues that younger voters care about.
If anyone can break this “intent to vote vs. actual vote turnout” gap it’s Michael Moore. But when Trump loses the election—there! I said it, and I said it!—we’re still going to have to ask ourselves how politics became so degraded and removed from people’s lives that Donald Trump could be seen as anything approaching normal.
I can recite Bobby Kennedy’s “Ripple of Hope” speech as if it was poetry (It is!) and I still have hope that people can once again have political heroes to admire. Maybe we’re about to elect one President.
As
wrote recently,Polls are inherently imprecise. That’s why there’s a margin of error. A poll with Kamala Harris up two and a poll with her down two say the same thing. This race is a toss-up.
I’ve been saying that I know how to recognize what a winning presidential campaign looks like, and Donald Trump aint one. Those of us old enough to remember being up against Ronald Reagan recall looking up and saying, “hello, steamroller!” But Donald Trump is driving a tinker-toy.
Michael Moore is right. If there’s anything you can do to get a non-voter to vote, do it! Here are some facts that might help.