Former president Donald J. Trump speaks at his rally at Madison Square Garden. Angelina Katsanis/AP Images.
NEW YORK — Around ten minutes into his speech at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, former President Donald Trump pointed to the press, assembled as usual in the back center of the venue, and labeled them the “fake news media.” The broadside was as predictable as his red tie. The response was one familiar to any reporter who’s been to a Trump rally: the crowd turned to face us, their faces contorted in anger, their mouths emitting boos and their thumbs gesturing derisively towards the ground. One small child I spotted from my seat in the press section gave us a vigorous double middle finger.
The strange yet symbiotic relationship between Trump and the press hasn’t changed much since 2016. He still trashes Fox News on social media and then calls into one of his favorite Fox News shows an hour later. He still packs his rallies full of press — their cameras broadcasting the Trump show to millions across the country — and
Most of the hits on the media are unscripted, a fact reflective of Trump’s ease with the material he’s been thumping for nearly a decade. At one point in Sunday night’s speech, during a rant about “the enemy within,” as he now refers to the Democratic Party, Trump stopped mid-thought to casually ad-lib that the media is “the real enemy, the enemy of the people.” The crowd turned and booed again.
The night was a stark reminder too of how much this searing disdain for the media, or at least the theater of it, has pervaded the Republican Party. A lengthy list of speakers took the stage on Sunday night, to fire up a red-capped crowd of supporters assembled in New York City, where Trump made his name, made his fortune, and eventually turned himself from tabloid curiosity into Manhattan’s most reviled man.
“In New York we refer to MSG as the Mecca,” said Brooklyn-born congressman Byron Donalds. On Sunday night at least, Donald Trump and his family, in the city that has long looked down on them, was God.
The press, by virtue of its supposed unfairness, was the enemy of light. One speaker fantasized about watching CNN’s Wolf Blitzer declare Trump the next president on election night. Vivek Ramaswamy accused the media of trying to cover up the fact that “Trump
One journalist escaped the wrath that thickened the air in Mecca. Doug Mills, the New York Times photographer who took the iconic photo of Trump when he was shot in the ear during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania earlier this year, drew scattered applause when he was mentioned by Trump adviser Dan Scavino. In Scavino’s telling, Trump, upon been shown the photo in the hours after he was shot, asked how Mills was doing; this was touted as evidence of Trump’s selflessness.
Some of the speakers Sunday night didn’t deliver performances that will help the Trump campaign in its final sprint to election day. Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian known by most as Kill Tony, called Puerto Rico “a floating pile of garbage,” joked about Black people “carving watermelons,” and Jewish people being cheap. Soon after the rally ended, the Trump campaign wisely distanced itself from the Puerto Rico joke. New York radio host Sid Rosenberg ranted about “fucking illegals” and called Hillary Clinton a “Jew hater” and “sick son of a bitch,” and said the Democratic Party “a bunch of degenerates, lowlifes, Jew haters, and low lives.” David Rem, a man no one seemed to know but who the campaign identified as a childhood friend of Trump, brandished a crucifix
Trump rally speaker David Rem pumps up the crowd with some holy media bashing. Angelina Katsanis/AP Images.
Those moments, which would spark a five-alarm fire in any campaign other than Trump’s, will fuel the interminable dance between the former president and the media. They will generate thousands of headlines, which will in turn be used by Trump and his supporters as proof the media is indeed the enemy. On Fox & Friends Monday morning, a Trump campaign spokesperson said it was “sad that the media will pick up on one joke that was made by a comedian rather than the truths that were shared…”
There was something reserved about the Trump rally on Sunday night. The rhetoric was as extreme as it has been throughout his campaign, but the setting of an arena plopped in the center of elite cosmopolitanism lent a certain sterility to the affair. This was New York; whatever the antithesis of Trump country is. It’s Madison Square Garden, home to the Knicks,
What they do believe: that Trump can’t possibly lose to Harris in eight days. In what you could see as an omen of the grim inevitable, Tucker Carlson told the raucous crowd that there’s no chance Harris draws “85 million votes.” The intention of his comments were clear: that if Harris does beat Trump, it can only be through a rigged election. Carlson, perhaps enjoying his total liberation from the factual constraints of a newsroom since his firing from Fox News, paused and smirked. “It’s going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, you know what? Kamala Harris, she’s just she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low IQ, former California prosecutor ever to be elected president, it was just a groundswell of popular support. I don’t think so. And to me, that is liberation.”
In this era of a decentralized information ecosystem and partisan attacks on the traditional press, who better to introduce Trump than Elon Musk, the man who has waged war against the media from his powerful perch as the owner of X, formerly Twitter. Musk, like Carlson, gave a wink to the election deniers in the building. Appealing for Trump supporters to
Whatever happens on election night, the media will be forced to once again play referee for a race that Trump is certain to challenge if it doesn’t go his way. That will lead to much more of the kinds of attacks we saw Sunday night, attacks so commonplace now they sound almost banal. If Trump does win, he has signaled that his second term would be far more unbridled than his first, including when it comes to cracking down on the media. In an ominous sign last week, the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times scrapped their papers’ Harris endorsements. Speculation abounds that they fear retribution under a second Trump administration.
Those editorial pages may not be opining on what they see anymore, but they are certainly watching. And so is everyone else. As the Trump campaign boasted, eleven different TV networks carried his speech Sunday night.
But for those of us who have been watching all along, who never tuned out Donald Trump, the takeaway from an event that should’ve been truly shocking was absolutely nothing. The Trump show is the same as it ever was, and the media’s role as heel hasn’t changed one bit. The only question now is whether his stop at the World’s Most Famous Arena will be the