James Antle of the Washington Examiner ponders former President Donald Trump’s approach to politics.
Time will tell whether former President Donald Trump’s massive rally at Madison Square Garden was the beginning of a successful closing argument or the MAGA movement’s electoral swan song.
The event was nevertheless consistent with Trump’s now nearly decade-long political career: risky unscripted events that few people running for office would ever attempt, that drive the news cycle for days but not always to his benefit, from a master showman who has formed a deep emotional connection with his supporters.
Trump illustrated on Sunday how much he has changed the Republican Party. Speaker after speaker got up to denounce Dick Cheney, the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, and other staples of GOP orthodoxy just 20 years ago, with the crowd seeming mostly in agreement. The exception, a holdover from that era of the GOP who is still liked by MAGA Republicans, was Rudy Giuliani, the 9/11-era “America’s Mayor” who was brought low by his ill-fated 2020 election maneuverings and received a standing ovation.
You can witness this shift at Vice President Kamala Harris’s events as well. She has been campaigning with Liz Cheney and has both Cheneys’ endorsements. Liberals on social media have been exhorting George W. Bush and even Mike Pence to follow suit.
Yet the main takeaway from the event was an insult comic’s disparaging reference to Puerto Rico. The commonwealth island doesn’t get a vote in the presidential election, though Trump won more than 96% of the vote in its Republican primary. (It should be noted that only a little over 1,000 people voted and the other candidates on the ballot had already withdrawn.) Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans living in the battleground states do, however.
The Trump campaign distanced itself from the joke, which clearly fell flat with the audience as well. This has so far invited scrutiny of which other remarks at the sprawling multispeaker rally the former president disavows or endorses.