Donald Trump at his Presidential campaign rally, Madison Square Garden, New York City, October 27, 2024 (Matt Rourke/AP)
Co-published with the Irish Examiner:
US Election 2024: What Would A Trump Victory Mean For The World?
EA on Irish and UK Outlets: US Election 2024 — A Choice Between “Freedom or Division”
EA on The Naked Scientists Podcast: Could Technology Decide US Presidential Election?
I was planning this week to write about the effect of either a Harris Administration or a Trump Presidency upon our lives in Ireland.
But then I watched Donald Trump’s rally from Madison Square Garden in New York City. And, as a native of the US, I was shaken to my core.
Most media attention has been on the podcaster who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”. That is the US territory, with almost 3.3 million people, which was savaged by Hurricane Maria in 2017. Almost 3,000 died as the Trump Administration withheld $20 billion in essential aid. Thousands remained without homes almost three years later.
But there was many more inflammatory, hate-filled statements from the podium. There were vicious sexual slurs against Hispanic and Latino Americans, as well as immigrants. There were insults of Black Americans. Rudy Giuliani, still trying to pay off $148 million in damages over his slander of two Georgia election workers, said Palestinians “are taught to kill us at two years old”.
Kamala Harris was a prostitute, “the Devil”, “the Antichrist”, and, bizarrely, a “Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor”. Hillary Clinton was a “sick son of a bitch”. Democrats were “a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew-haters, and lowlives”.
Far from distancing himself from the cesspit of vitriol, Trump embraced it. He reiterated his threat to use the military against “the enemy within” — any American who dared express opposition to his rhetoric or his actions.
I did not think of this as Nazism, even as others noted that the Madison Square Garden had hosted a pro-Nazi rally in 1939. I did not consider it Fascism, although Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly says he “fits the general definition of a fascist” and Trump’s former head of the US military, Gen. Mark Milley, says he is “fascist to his core”.
Yet if Trump is too chaotic and incoherent to implement a far-right ideology, he is still a wannabe authoritarian. For all of his lies and disinformation, this was a demonstration of truth: he and his supporters viscerally hate many of those who live in America — and they hate the confines of the American system within which they are striving to take power.
After almost a decade of watching Trump every day, I felt a new sensation on that Sunday morning.
For the first time, I was fearful. Not fear that Trump might win the election on November 5, having tried an attempted coup to overturn the vote four years earlier. Fear that the political culture, in the country where I was born and raised, might be broken for good.
“It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way”
Hours before Trump’s rally of hate, Kamala Harris told a Philadephia crowd of “two extremely different visions for our nation”: “We have an opportunity before us to turn the page on the fear and the divisiveness that have characterized our politics for a decade because of Donald Trump.”
Two days later, at the White House Ellipse where Trump implored to stop the peaceful transfer to Joe Biden on January 6, 2021, Harris spoke of the need to protect Medicare. She emphasized women’s rights, including reproductive rights, with almost half of US states effectively banning abortion. She set out cooperation, rather than conflict, to address the economy, immigration, and climate change.
Then she juxtaposed the “American” and the authoritarian:
The fact that someone disagrees with us, does not make them “the enemy from within”. They are family, neighbors, classmates, coworkers.
It can be easy to forget a simple truth. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Trump’s rally shook some US media out of their stupor. The New York Times, unsettled by the display in its backyard, wrote of “A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism”. CBS headlined “offensive, crude commentary” and Politico “racist rhetoric”.
But Trumpist outlets pretended none of this happened. Fox declared an “exhilirating” rally “filled with those proud to be Americans”. Breitbart turned the “floating island of garbage” insult into “Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe Endorses Trump”.
They did so, hoping the news cycle would change and leave behind their authoritarian. And by Wednesday, thanks to a gaffe by President Joe Biden, they could proclaim that he had called Trump supporters “garbage”.
What Side Of History Are You On?
Appearing alongside Harris last Saturday in Michigan, former First Lady Michelle Obama appealed to the nation:
I recognize that there are a lot of angry, disillusioned people out there, upset with the slow pace of change, and I get it. It is reasonable to be frustrated. We all know we have a lot more work to do in this country.
But to anyone out there thinking about sitting out this election or voting for Donald Trump or a third-party candidate in protest because you’re fed up, let me warn you, your rage does not exist in a vacuum. If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women will become collateral damage to your rage.
Obama was focusing on women’s rights. But her plea could be applied to health care, education, the environment, the economy, immigration, or foreign crises from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to Israel’s attacks in Gaza and Lebanon.
For if the US system is broken on a Trumpist altar of divisive invective, if rights are suborned to a narcissist’s priority of vengeance, if society gives way to ego, then there is no area of American life — or lives abroad — that will be secure.
As Obama put the question for November 5, “I am asking you all from the core of my being to take our lives seriously….What side of history do you want to be on?”
