This Saturday I will be at Madison Square Garden in New York for the climax of Donald Trump's election campaign. It will be one hell of a spectacle, designed to show Trump returning in triumph like a conquering emperor to the city that spurned him. The hall will be filled with 20,000 Maga supporters decked in red, white and blue, roaring "USA! USA! USA!" The message will be: Trump is unstoppable. Those who are against him should get out of the way.
I have been to scores of Trump rallies. This one feels significant because of the memories and fears it evokes. In 1939, on the eve of war in Europe, 20,000 American Nazis - members of the German American Bund-gathered at the same spot in serried ranks to hail Hitler in front of huge US flags and a gigantic portrait of George Washington. On MSNBC, James Carville, the veteran Democratic spinner, accused Trump of mimicking that rally. "See what happened there," he urged viewers. "They are telling you exactly what they're going to do: 'We're going to institute a fascist regime"" Is this dread warning over the top? Clearly "it could happen here", to paraphrase Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel about American fascism.
According to historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen: "It is beyond doubt that Trump has provided a new stage and a new context for fascist ideologies and practices, many of which have roots in American extremist traditions and histories as well." After the "brat" summer and "joy" of her earlier campaign, Kamala Harris has stopped calling Trump "weird" in favour of portraying him as a dangerous and unstable threat to democracy. Initially, she was praised for dropping Joe Biden's jaded rhetoric about saving the "soul of the nation" in favour of celebrating freedom. This was a defiant and confident message that worked. But after Trump threatened to turn the "National Guard, or... the military" on "sick people, radical Left lunatics", her rhetoric has darkened.
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