GOP Woodstock: Inside the Madding Crowd at Donald Trump's MSG Rally
Triumph of the Swill
Let's hear it for the flag-wrapped dudebros and all-star lineup of mainly new friends our once (and future?) king is counting on to restore him to the Oval.
IMAGES ON PAGE © PHOEBE EATON 2024.
“Phoebe, it’s Trump.”
Donald Trump is texting for the umpteenth time.
“THIS TEXT IS NOT FOR EVERYONE,” presidential candidate Trump taps. “You're getting it because I love you, Phoebe.”
I’d signed up online to rubberneck Trump’s short-notice rally at Madison Square Garden—in a city with blue ice in its veins, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris on the brain, and little patience left for its Republican native son.
Suddenly Trump and I were in one of these newly voguish digital relationships.
For years, the “Fake News” media (as Trump pegged them) had Trump pegged as some sicko Nuremberg re-enactor—and those who would vote for him Nazis by association. Trump’s rallies had always been floaters in our peripheral vision, going off in faraway rural environs. But now the tent was being raised in my own backyard. His Garden party was shaping up to be a historical happening. All that said, sharing my digits with Candidate Trump was starting to feel like a mistake. Big-time.
Immediately, he'd turned stalker:
“PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. Most will ignore my text, but I know you would NEVER.”
His all-cap advances were that of an awkward teenage boy. Trump lays it on me that he’s got product he needs to move, a $47 gold dark MAGA hat “limited release” like some special-edition Nike high-tops. Mere MAGA-donors more willing to requite Trump’s love than myself could feel like megadonors for a comparative pittance. In just 24 hours, I would be standing among them, the first several thousand of an eventual audience of 20,000 in a line of arena aspirants it’s been claimed stretched all the way to the East River.
JOLLY GOOD FELON
Reputable crème de la Dem publications were theorizing Trump might well be the Antichrist, those crimson MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN baseball hats the mark of “the Beast” foretold in Revelations as stamped on everybody’s foreheads. Now into his third election cycle, Trump is unusually a convicted felon—with several other indictments pending. There is no precedent for Trump’s situation (but then, much about Trump lacks precedent unless you believe he’s the man with the toothbrush mustache reincarnated). In the picaresque novel still being written, the highest court in the land effectively granted Trump a reprieve from immediate flagellation and the government-agency deerstalkers of these last four years.
But!
Only if he wins.
Trump declares November 5 will be “the most important day in the history of America.” (For him, maybe.)
RAGING RED BULL
Ten in the morning, and the crowd behind the barricades is marking the hours with a staccato chant till the gates fly up:
God! Loves! Trump! God! Loves! Trump!
Somebody up (or down) there loves this guy as much as all these young men burrito-wrapped in nylon American flags for warmth and chugging Red Bull. Who’ve been standing out here all night long to exercise the privilege of early boarding at the Thunderdome.
Trump is counting on these disaffected Flag Bros to help him take back America. Several early-admission applicants mention they are repeat customers, veterans of rallies in Northeastern states generally veering blue that Trump only incidentally bothers with.
The all-star, convention-quality lineup would include expected Topps baseball cards (Mike Johnson, JD Vance, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk) and the unexpected (Dr. Phil, Hulk Hogan, formerly reluctant wife Melania, and Rudy Giuliani in an early, penalty-box slot gabbling that Trump—who Rudy has said stiffed him $2 million in legal fees—is actually a man of secret charitable gestures).
I am thankful these Flag Bros come uploaded with astonishing facial-recognition software, so thorough is their immersion in Fox News, ESPN, YouTube, TikTok, and sundry podcasts. Outside and in the stands, they are quick to attach i.d.’s to faces in the crowd: Radio rabble-rouser Sid Rosenberg. Ultimate Fighting CEO Dana White. “Political painter” Scott LoBaido. Vinny from Jersey Shore.
LONG STRANGE TRIP
The event promised to be a GOP Woodstock. Only: somebody brought the bad brown acid. A podcasting jester imported from down South to warm up the crowd was soon shredding a do-ragged Black dude on the floor for carving watermelons instead of a pumpkin for Halloween. The punch lines nailed Jews as cheapskates, Palestinians as rock-throwers, and Latinos who could only be counted on to propagate like fruit flies. But politics is dirty pool: whoever vetted insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe had a fairly accurate idea of this bird-flipping room. (Days later, the Fake News was still outraged, Fox News grudgingly conceding racist talk “marred” the rally.)
The bits will live forever on the Internet, but one can’t imagine any will hurt Trump’s standing. Quite the contrary: Tony Hinchcliffe is now a front-page name, his routine nothing Don Rickles wouldn’t have pulled at the Sahara in Vegas—and this was very much a Vegas crowd, a casino crowd, folks who smoke with impunity, prefer Dunkin’ Donuts to Starbucks, and would pick a pickup over a Prius any day. These are people who refuse to be judged or nannied by the bleeding hearts turned hemophiliacs of the current Administration giving everybody including non-American citizens an ear and a handout and—important—bragging about it.
Hinchcliffe may have called Puerto Rico a “a floating island of garbage” but not 48 hours later, Puerto Rican community leaders in Allentown, Pennsylvania were boldly backslapping Trump as their boon compañero at that city’s rally. It wasn’t quite a Leni Riefenstahl moment—Allentown many miles off the global stage—but the go-along-to-get-along signaled a Triumph of the Swill all the same.
There was a kind of point being made as muddled as an Old Kentucky julep. Free speech is under attack, Hinchcliffe insisted. Tonight would be an Up Yours to the New York Times schoolmarms tabulating Trump’s use of swear words as proof of encroaching dementia.
Tonight would be a sharp, pointed repudiation of the gender-blending “war on children,” DEI doubletalk, pronouns for every occasion, leaky borders, gas-pump groin punches, and our collective neurasthenic weakness that has our enemies now frogmarching us into World War III. Or so several speakers were claiming, including wild card Vivek Ramaswamy, who couldn’t have been more pleasant as he too made the incredible suggestion, emerging in trendy highwaters to gamer Sam Tinnesz’s booming alterna-rock anthem “This is how legends are made.”
For all the macho talk of fight fight fight, no Flag Bro wants World War III. Or the nuclear war Army veteran and former U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard called “likely” with Harris at the helm—as if it were an afternoon thundershower. (Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick failed to get the peaceable-kingdom memo, shrieking Trump had to be elected “because we must crush jihad!”)
Republicans alone still had “a good sense of humor,” Hinchcliffe explained. Does that also explain how Confederate anthem Dixie wound up on the arena turntable, filling a gap between speakers?
Whatsa matter? Y’all can’t take a joke?
And so it is and has been with Donald Trump. People hear the loaded rhetoric, the more hair-raising “concepts of plans,” and assume he’s kidding.
“The Republican party has really become the party of inclusion,” Trump will say tonight. (Kidding, not kidding.)
DON’T BE STUPID, BE A SMARTY
Sounding like Josef Mengele’s lab assistant, Trump will insist everyone knows Kamala Harris is “a very low-IQ individual” (kidding, not kidding)—though everyone saw her beat him like a filthy carpet in their one debate.
This kidder doesn’t kid. His first term affirmed it, and part of his appeal is, he makes good on threats. The other team has effectively made the same low-IQ claims of Trump. But if it’s Trump who’s the dummy—the best candidate not for presidency but for memory care—how is he still the most quoteworthy President since JFK? At 78, he’s still serving up the tastiest soundbites:
FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! WIN! WIN! WIN!
The slogan was now stamped on baseball hats. Flag Bros buy a lot of baseball hats. I have scores of texts from my boy Trump about baseball hats.
Inside MSG, the crowd was bathed in a shimmery bioluminescence. Trump’s big-energy bubble was popping with a cortisol rage. His family and qualifying surrogates roved the freak-off’s edges, occasionally bopping into reserved seats above the elite ground-level suites.
The Flag Bros were feeling fluffed by all these special guests.
MANE ATTTRACTIONS
The call-girl hair extensions rendered Don Jr.’s spinfluencer g.f. Kim Guilfoyle and RNC co-chair Lara Trump easy to spot amid the grubbier sleep-starved volk. The Flag Bros pointed out Trump lawyerette Alina Habba, a glitterbomb also working the hair extensions who’d soon be swinging her blingy Team MAGA jacket down the runway to the podium like a table dancer getting ready for the throw. Judge Jeanine Pirro was gladhanding her way through the suite seats also star-spangled in sequins, as brazenly bouffant as when she successfully secured an eleventh-hour pardon from President Trump for her tax-evasive ex-husband Al.
One section over, a pregnant Tiffany Trump stayed put in the stands beside her husband. The clan’s Big Daddy had denied his reported aversion to being photographed with Tiff when her weight is up, but one had to wonder.
Having Jewish-convert daughter Ivanka in the house would have been a compelling kiss-off to Trump’s Nazi-hunting critics, yet former “senior White House advisors” Ivanka and husband Jared Kushner were conspicuous in their absence.
DEMOGRAPHIC PARTY
Dad later discloses son Barron is home watching Trump on TV. Talk of Trump’s lone college kid comes hot on the heels of a shoutout to JD Vance, JD’s Yale- and Cambridge-educated wife Usha, and their excellent combined breeding potential. (Vance’s mouth is agawp in amazement, his signature Human Pez Dispenser look.)
“I would like to have their children, because they are going to be smart,” Trump observed a mite incongruously/enviously/eugenically (take your pick), 18-year-old Barron Trump endlessly scrutinized (when allowed out of the shoebox) for signs of the autism the family strenuously denies. Teddy bear Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz can display a son with issues and be revered for his humanity, but Trumpers don’t revere Trump for his—quite the opposite. Trump’s recent stint as McDonald Trump working a french-fry station in Pennsylvania is more about one-upping Candidate Kamala and what he’s deemed her fake college job flipping burgers. (McDonald Jr. will claim onstage tonight even less credibly that he suffered sticker shock recently at the same fast-food chain when presented with his own lunch check.)
Some 20-year-old emo boy out in Butler, Pennsylvania almost took Trump out, but this same demographic could put him back in. Back in the game. Back in the Oval. Much of the crowd personifies this traditional Madison Avenue sweet spot: young voting males ages 18 to 34. Trump hopes to hoover them in significant numbers from Tony Hinchcliffe’s mega-million Kill Tony-podcast base. This said, it must be noted fully half of everybody else packed into MSG is female—and nobody quote-unquote identifying as female either—unless Hulk Hogan counts, striking poses in his yellow cat’s-eye specs and garish feathered boa like some fem queen from the House of Xtravaganza. Sure, white people are thickest on the ground, but Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are hardly negligible in number.
RESTORATION DRAMA
Behind the barricades outside, I found myself sardined together with an elderly Chinese lady. Born in Inner Mongolia, she’d emigrated from Communist China only to find herself triggered by America’s Cancel Culture (though the knock-kneed concept of “triggers” is certainly nothing she subscribes to). She went off on Dominion voting machines “flipping the names from one name to the other;” “illegal surge voting;” and how the Democrats “have nothing but cheating.”
What a pack of hyenas! (Her words.) Trump is the one with “integrity”. It’s Trump who “says the truth.”
She had lurched to the front of the pack on a walker, incredibly. (And brave as hell given a single firecracker might have set off a stampede anywhere in the lengthy journey to our bleacher seats.) This throng was tired and ravenous, many deciding to pass on MSG’s $15 hamburgers, forgoing the lines soon ringing MSG’s outer perimeter. They worried they might miss something or somebody worth seeing inside the bubble.
Trump’s longtime personal security consultant Chuck Zito, a former president of the New York branch of the Hell’s Angels, strolled the arena floor—a reminder Trump’s magnificent Restoration Drama could turn Altamont very, very quickly. Where were the Democrat disruptors who’d threatened to short-circuit this circus? Several hundred were penned out of sight and mind on the steps of Moynihan train station behind the stadium, the words “TRUMP PRAISED HITLER” looking pretty pipsqueaky when projected Jenny Holzer-style onto the Garden’s hindquarters.
VILE HITLER
“Hillary Clinton said this is a Nazi rally here today,” Hinchcliffe by-the-way’d impishly.
“Fuck that bitch!” the Flag Boys reliably shouted, for the first but hardly last time. About Hillary. About Kamala. You’d think both names were on the following Tuesday’s ballot.
“Racism and sexism, we gotta all agree we got to do a little work there,” said Black co-founder of Death Row Records Michael “Harry-O” Harris. (Which is putting it meekly, but then, he was pardoned by Trump after 33 years in the joint for drug trafficking and attempted murder. Quid meet quo.)
RIGHT IN THE KISSER
Tucker Carlson offered he’d seen the “Samoan-Malaysian low-IQ former California prosecutor” Kamala kissing her husband Doug with a Covid mask on: “That’s her version of love.” Not like Trump and Melania performing a chaste cheek mwah and hand-hold in an excessive display of PDA onstage (for them), a pal immediately texting, “If only the Russians would hack all the amendments to her pre-nup and release that.” A more buttery blonde than 4 years ago, Melania was glowingly compliant; it wouldn’t serve her either, having Donald in jail and her on the hook for liquidating their assets to fulfill the multiple court judgments against him including a pesky finding of sexual abuse.
Surprise guest Dr. Phil had said the Trump camp was tired of being “bullied.” Tired of having to furtively celebrate their candidate like marranos during the Inquisition. Market-making Manhattan art dealer Alberto “Tico” Mugrabi, whose billionaire Israeli collector father José lives in Trump Tower, was seated just in front of me in the elite suite seats. He had two college-age boys with him, brothers who looked to be relatives. What appeared a brand new $20 MAGA hat was clutched in his hand, but not for a second did he throw it on. The Fake News would run sweeping long shots of the Silly Arena People pumping their fists that, from the distance, bore slight resemblance to Nazi Germany’s Sieg Heil salute. But not once did he or his boys leap to their feet unless it was to snap pictures of the more sensational arena goings-on.
LOUSY HUN BASTARDS
There was a surprise guest no one’s mentioning who had the floor even before the puckish podcaster. The face of George C. Scott as General George S. Patton beamed in on MSG’s lunar-module Jumbotron to address Trump’s troops and potentially immunize the evening from inevitable Nazi Germany comparisons. (Didn’t stop the networks that night from splicing 1939 archival footage of a “Pro American rally” at the Garden into their coverage, showing equal numbers of then New York-area Nazis objecting to “job-taking Jewish refugees” and a “Jewish-controlled press.”)
Patton the movie was now twice the age of the stadium Flag Bros. But the entire opener—Patton whipping up young men who want nothing more than to be heroes about all the ways they can stick it the “lousy Hun bastards”—only reminded the Trumpian Weltanschauung was nothing new:
“Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time….Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.”
FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! WIN! WIN! WIN!
There were glimmers the crowd lacked complete and total buy-in.
“This is so much more than a political movement,” Ozempic-medal skinny Eric Trump grandiosely declared onstage. “This is about the greatest family in the world!”
That is when Eric lost the Flag Bro seated just behind me.
“Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa!” was this guy’s spontaneous utterance. There was a lot of talk onstage about Dems thinking they were better than those assembled. Smarter. Black Florida Congressman Byron Donalds explained that even Harris’s word salads “were meant to make her feel smart and make you feel dumb.” But of all the jaw-dropping jibberjabber this night, it was Eric’s silver-spooned superiority complex that had finally bumped this caped crusader.
Minutes on, Eric was claiming almost 200,000 people had shown up wanting to be a part of it here at the Garden. A row-mate of mine remarked with knowing resignation, “Tomorrow they’ll be jumping up the numbers even more.”
We had spent an awfully long time waiting for the grand finale Baked Alaska to appear. But once he finally shambled in unfurling his stump spiel, it was mere minutes before I saw my first yawn.
YOU ARE GETTING SLEEPY
The problem turns out to be Trump’s oft-parodied voice, its highly hypnotic “you are getting sleepy” register. Sure Adolph Hitler himself tended to bang on for two or more hours, but all that shouty foaming at the mouth about how Germany had been cheated kept audiences reasonably crystal-methylated. By contrast, when Trump declares We’re not going to take it anymore as he did at the Garden, he seems less primed to hurl a Fake News TV set out the window than ready to pet a cat.
Trump praises himself for never using a teleprompter, but a teleprompter surely would cure his tendency to ramble, about Venezuelan prison gangs. The Green New Deal scam. Nord Stream 2. Some 325,000 “missing dead child sex slaves.” The Enemy Aliens act of 1798. “Stupid generals like Milley and Mattis.” And Crooked Hillary, who years ago was so damned sure he’d start a war.
And now look. Look who’s getting their war on.
“In Trump’s private time, he never talks about people he hates,” adjutant shill Tucker Carlson confided to this stadium of many thousands. And that might well be true. But Trump has an acute understanding of what significant subsets of both the Uber- and Untermenschen are hating on at any given moment.
YOU ARE GETTING SLEEPY
A young male row-mate of mine charitably posited Trump really wants to give the crowd their money’s worth having made us stand on hot coals to get in there. It’s true Trump seemed in no hurry to call it a wrap—but not out of any seeming desire to look cool. Hang out. He just wasn’t done gassing up on narcissistic supply. No bulletproof screen blunted the energy field emanating from the 20,000 mostly strangers he was trusting not to whack him out. That was brave.
Or maybe Donald Trump is genuinely fated to be our next president: First Dude.
“We vote next week, God voted three months ago,” Trump’s immigration advisor and mass-deportations mastermind Stephen Miller was saying hours earlier, the attempted Butler hit anointing Trump as an Immortal now pitching up in these revival tents around the country to offer us “salvation.”
BILLION-DOLLAR BABIES
But Trump had some surprising competition at the Garden for the position of Almighty Zeus: Elon Musk, who’d joined him on the campaign trail. (So many billion-dollar government contracts in the balance.) Musk would have a place in Trump’s reborn Administration as a Government Efficiency Commissioner, Trump said.
But here was financier Howard Lutnick, introducing Elon Musk to rallyists as “the greatest capitalist in the history of the United States of America.” And “Kill Tony” Hinchcliffe knighting Musk with the title “The World’s Smartest, Richest Man.”
You don’t have to have a high I.Q. to spot the issue. This bromance has a built-in expiration date. The barely perceptible downtick may have started with the hats (kidding, not kidding), namely Elon’s “Dark MAGA” version with the black-on-black lettering.
“I didn’t even know we made a black hat,” Trump was saying. But when Trump returned to the scene of the crime in Butler, Pennsylvania, dragging Musk along with him, Dark MAGA “became our No. 1 best-selling hat,” Trump admitted. Only now there was a serrated edge in Trump’s voice, there being room for only one No. 1 in Trumplandia.
Trump finally abandoned the podium to the usual strains of Y.M.C.A.:
Young man, there’s no need to feel down, I said/Young man, pick yourself off the ground…
“I would’ve been happy if this ended 25 minutes ago,” said the chatty young man seated next to me as we now scrambled over stadium seating in our haste to reach the exits faster.
Trump did some disco hands, a caucasian little corn-shuck for some last laughs before he vanished behind a bank of American flags.
And immediately my phone began to vibrate.