New York Times reporters Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman, and Michael Gold were on the scene for the purported Trump hate-fest held at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. The resulting story featured what political polling guru (and Kamala Harris supporter) Nate Silver in his newsletter called “the sort of headline” the paper’s “liberal critics” have “been pining for”: “A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism.”
Donald J. Trump’s closing rally at Madison Square Garden on the second to last Sunday before the election was a release of rage at a political and legal system that impeached, indicted and convicted him, a vivid and at times racist display of the dark energy animating the MAGA movement.
A comic kicked off the rally by dismissing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” then mocked Hispanics as failing to use birth control, Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers, and called out a Black man in the audience with a reference to watermelon.
Another speaker likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute with “pimp handlers.” A third called her “the Antichrist.” And the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked Ms. Harris -- the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father -- with a made-up ethnicity, saying she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”
By the time the former president himself took the stage, an event billed as delivering the closing message of his campaign, with nine days left in a tossup race, had instead become a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.
At least we got to see a Democrat “seizing” something in the New York Times for a change:
Ms. Harris’s campaign seized on the spectacle, and some Republicans, including from Florida and Puerto Rico, denounced the comic’s comments about the island….
The Times issued more of its politically correct language about illegal immigrants:
Mr. Trump’s vows of mass deportation and inveighing against undocumented immigrants had an audience in New York City, too, where thousands of migrants who crossed the southern border without authorization have been given sanctuary and some residents have complained about the use of city services to help them.
Some of the reporters’ criticisms were ridiculous, the insults extraneous (is it so strange that a speaker at a Trump rally would flatter the host?).
So many of the day’s warm-up speeches were spent portraying the former president as he wants to be seen. Several speakers talked about him surviving a July assassination attempt not in spiritual terms but in muscular ones, describing his toughness at “dodging” the bullet. Many also falsely claimed he “built” the skyline in a city in which he was always seen as a B-list developer with a small portfolio of buildings that he acquired long after they were constructed.
Prominent Democrats, including Tim Walz and Hillary Clinton, started the nasty comparison of the Trump rally and a 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, yet the Democrats were portrayed as victims.
David Rem, a childhood friend of Mr. Trump, called Ms. Harris “the devil.” Grant Cardone, a businessman, declared that the sitting vice president had “pimp handlers.” Sid Rosenberg denounced Hillary Clinton as a “sick son of a bitch” for linking the Trump rally and a pro-Nazi event at the arena of the same name decades ago.
The media tends to be less sensitive when Republicans are not just joked about, but threatened "as a joke" at political events. A newsletter from the 1995 AFL-CIO union convention, which featured then-Vice President Al Gore as the main speaker, included this tasteless tidbit: "Drive home safely and remember: If you must drink and drive, try to do it when [Texas Republican Sen.] Phil Gramm is crossing the street."
The New York Times ignored that truly hateful crack, as did the networks, and they certainly didn’t demand Gore distance himself.
