If anyone thinks that the normal rules of politics still apply to the Republican Party, yesterday’s Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, and Trump’s behavior in the days immediately preceding it, should put that hypothesis to a long-overdue end. At this point in a presidential election, candidates are usually fighting for the persuadable voters, many of whom are in the middle of the political continuum. After tacking hard during the primaries to the extremes, they would be steering hard towards the middle in the general election. Trump and the people around him are doing the opposite of that.
So what are they doing? “Firing up their base” doesn’t quite capture the loathsomeness of what happened at Madison Square Garden yesterday, an orgy of nativism, racism, vulgarity, xenophobia, paranoia, and unadulterated hate. Bile spewed at Puerto Ricans (“A floating island of garbage”) , Latinos (“They don’t pull out, they come inside”), blacks (“carving watermelons”), non-white immigrants (“America is for Americans and Americans only”), Democrats (“They’re on the side of the terrorists,” “They’re full on to Marxism and socialism,” “They tried to kill him”), and Kamala Harris (“She is the devil,” “Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ”) is clearly not an appeal to moderate voters. It’s not messaging, it’s license.
The Madison Square Garden rally, along with Trump’s other events and interviews, are an encouragement to give voice to the audience’s darkest impulses. It’s not only permissible, but good to say these things. Go ahead and vomit up the worst forms of hatred, roll around in that sludge, and give a thumbs up to everyone else doing it. It’s also the primer coat for future layers of election denial, interference with the electoral process, threats against public officials, and political violence.
Anyone who hesitates calling this fascism is being deliberately dim. It’s the pure form of fascist content, of sentiment over reason, of demonology over dialogue. And it is the opposite of what you would expect a non-fascistic political party to be doing several days before an election.
It is also highly pornographic. I’m using that term in a non-sexual context, obviously, though there are clearly sexual and sexist overtones to what some in the MAGA crowd have been saying. Look only at Tucker Carlson’s eager fantasizing about America as a 15 year old girl who “needs” to be spanked for one example. For another, there’s Elon Musk’s PAC, which is now using the C-word to describe Kamala Harris. Instead, pornography in this context is something that takes a normal human impulse and strips it of its humanity. In pornography of the sexual sort, there is no love, no emotional context other than lust. Women are one-dimensional creatures capable only of endless, impersonal carnality and submission.
In political pornography, there is no principled disagreement, no compromise, no community beyond the clan. Just hatred. All the targets of hatred — immigrants, elected Democrats, trans people, non-subservient media, etc. etc. — are stripped of their humanity, turned into equally one-dimensional targets of dominance and subservience slash fiction. They have no souls, only bodies.
People can become addicted to pornography, which slowly replaces the normal, healthy architecture of emotional connections to fellow human beings with a darker, more solitary emotional framing. Hatred and outrage can be intoxicating, and like all drugs, require ever larger doses to reach the high that people seek. That also makes it unsurprising that the Trump campaign has reached this final destination in late October. The Pornographer In Chief, and all the other people who organized the Madison Square Rally, picked the speakers, reviewed what they were going to say, sequenced their appearances, and looked approvingly on the results, were putting on a particular show designed not for persuasion, but for a dark emotional release.
Only the most extreme cynics and nihilists can excuse the Madison Square Garden rally. Only someone who believes in a completely debased view of politics, or human nature for that matter, can say that a festival of hatred is just par for the course, nothing to worry about, or something “baked into” a candidate’s appeal. These are the real dead souls.
