By José R. Oro*
The apotheosis of his erratic, ego-driven, increasingly openly fascist — even Hitlerian — campaign, the event is intended to be the final blow in Trump’s bid to re-take the White House.
J.D. Vance’s, no doubt, effusive, sycophantic, and hypocritical introduction will be his version of Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” song to John F. Kennedy in that same venue in 1962. But a more telling comparison would be with the American Nazi mass rally held there on February 20, 1939. The October 27th event will give Trump another opportunity to promote the Nazi concept of Rassenhygiene, “racial cleansing.” As Trump says, “We have to clean up our country;” immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the nation;” “they are eating the cats and dogs”; they are invading our homes and slitting our throats. And they are not the only enemy. Those American citizens who oppose Trump, he calls “vermin,” and vows to imprison them or worse.
He declared that his former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Reetired General Mark Milley should be executed for assuring his Chinese counterpart that the United States was not planning an imminent attack. Milley has since told reporter and author Bob Woodward that “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump…he is a complete fascist.” Asked at a Christian Nationalist rally if he would preside over military tribunals in a second Trump term, former national security advisor Retired General Mike Flynn, who received Trump pardons for his convictions as an unregistered foreign agent and obstructor of justice — responded, “Believe me, the gates of Hell — my Hell will open.”
Trump will also continue his flaying of the news media, what the Nazi’s called Lugenpresse, “the lying press.” He often threatens to take away television networks’ licenses, and imprison journalists and even talk-show hosts. When CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Kamala Harris (Trump declined his invitation to be interviewed), he tweeted “TAKE AWAY CBS LICENSE.”
Three years later, the German American Bund held its own massive rally in the same venue. Before a giant portrait of George Washington framed by swastikas, speakers declared their “America First” ideology promulgating the “great replacement theory” that Jews and other “inferior races” were displacing Aryan Americans. The Nazis claimed the mantle of true Americanism and Christian nationalism. “Stop Jewish domination of Christian America,” said Bund Fuhrer, Fritz Kuhn. “You Aryans, Nordics, and Christians, demand that our government be returned to the people who founded it.”
On October 27, 2024, The “America First” ideology will once again be declared, the “great replacement theory” once again promoted — the culmination of the Republican Party’s downward moral spiral since the 2017 Charlottesville rally, when neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us,” and Trump remarked that there were “good people of both sides.” Fascism requires a threat to the dominant culture, by aliens who can be characterized with dehumanizing language in order to justify violence and inhuman treatment. Democracy is failing to protect us, the fascists declare, and so a strongman is needed. In his announcement of his Garden rally, Trump told New Yorkers that the city was “reeling from Kamala’s reckless border-opening policies,” flooding the city “with criminal illegal immigrants.” The whole country is being invaded by rampaging criminal gangs and murderers, he tells us. They commit murder because “it’s in their genes… there are a lot of bad genes in our country now.”
Donors to the Madison Square Garden event are paying up to $1 million to attend. They have been promised the full “Ultra MAGA Experience.”
* The writer is a Cuban-American who seldom contributes stories for Prensa Latina English News Service.
mh/jo
