Trump’s Madison Square Garden scandal: Is it too late to undo the damage?

After the 2016 election, once everyone recovered from the shock, the analyses of what happened started to gel into a conventional wisdom that argued Donald Trump won because a bunch of non-college-educated white people felt “economic anxiety.” So thousands of stories and features from reporters were sent out to rural Pennsylvania diners and Iowa church socials to figure out what Trump voters truly want. But the fact was that it was an extremely close Electoral College victory that could have gone either way with just a handful of votes in a couple of swing states. The main data guru at the time, Nate Silver, did a post-election analysis which showed that whenever there was an event, such as Hillary Clinton collapsing briefly at a 9/11 event or the Washington Post reporting of Donald Trump’s gross commentary on the “Access Hollywood” tape, there would be a slight drop in the polls for the affected candidate but they would rebound to the usual stasis within a couple of weeks.

Trump was still struggling to recover from the “Access Hollywood” scandal at the end of October of 2016 and Clinton was ahead in the aggregated polling by about 6 points. Then FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress announcing that the agency was following up on the Clinton email investigation, and the media once again went wild with the story that had captivated them for months. Clinton’s polls immediately dropped and never had a chance to recover because Election Day was just too soon. The rest is history.

Silver gathered plenty of evidence to back up his theory that the Comey letter and the subsequent media frenzy so close to the election was decisive in Clinton’s loss. Why do I bring that up now? Well, that event happened exactly eight years ago today. You may remember the famous New York Times front page the next morning:

The polls are a lot tighter today than they were in 2016. But as that year proved, any small misstep can matter greatly because there is no time to recover. And it’s just possible that Trump made one yesterday with his horrifying rally at Madison Square Garden in New York.

The event was packed and it went on for many hours as his rallies are wont to do. The speakers were pretty much uniformly crude, extreme and insulting in one way or another. It got off to a roaring start with radio host Sid Rosenberg calling Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff a “crappy jew” and keeping it classy by saying, “She is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton. What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party. A bunch of degenerates. Lowlives, Jew-haters, and lowlives. Every one of ’em. Every one of ’em.” So that was nice.

Another speaker, David Rem, supposedly a childhood friend of Trump’s (apparently not true) said, “Kamala Harris is the devil! She is the Antichrist!” A real estate expert (?) named Grant Cardone took to the podium to declare that the former California attorney general, senator and current vice president is “the least qualified person to ever run for any office in America” and claims that she has “pimp handlers,” which I think has a pretty clear implication.

After Trump the day before had made a big pitch to American Muslims to vote for him, Rudy Giuliani showed up and slammed Palestinians:

The Palestinians are taught to kill us at two years old. They won’t let a Palestinian in Jordan.. in Egypt. And Harris wants to bring them to you.

Trump’s transition chief, Howard Lutnick, yelled “we must crush Jihad!” and waxed on about the 1890s when America was great while Trump’s top adviser Steven Miller really brought home the 1939 vibes with his declaration that “America is for Americans!” (It sounded better in the original German: Nur für Deutsche a genuine Nazi slogan.) RFK Jr. was there too, ranting about the “corruption at the CDC, the FDA, the NIH and the CIA.” Trump later promised him, “I’m gonna let him go wild on health. I’m gonna let him go wild on the foods. I’m gonna let him go wild on the medicines.” And Tucker Carlson took the stage to huge applause, laughing maniacally and delivering a crude racist insult toward Kamala Harris:

Those are just the highlights of some of the introductory speeches before Trump came on and did his usual schtick which had people leaving the venue in droves.

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But there was one very special speech given by a “comedian” at the start of the event. His name is Tony Hinchcliffe and he apparently has a very popular podcast. He got the whole event rolling with this line:

He also had a gag about hanging out with a Black friend and instead of carving pumpkins, they carved a watermelon. But this Puerto Rico “joke” caused a sensation and not for nothing. In this very tight race, Trump is depending on making inroads among Latino voters to make up for his losses among white college-educated suburbanites. The line immediately went viral.

As luck would have it, Kamala Harris happened to be in Pennsylvania at that very moment making a pitch to Puerto Rican voters (there are almost half a million of them in the state) when word of the insult hit the internet. Within a matter of minutes, we saw Puerto Rican megastar Bad Bunny, soon followed by Rickey Martin and J Lo, (with a combined 315 million followers on Instagram alone) all endorsing Harris and criticizing Trump. Florida politicians immediately began to denounce the comment. The Trump campaign was soon forced to come forward and announce it didn’t reflect their position. All of this happened as the rally was still going on!

Is it just another tempest in a teapot? Could be. Trump is a master at eluding all accountability. He didn’t say anything about it in his own speech but perhaps he’ll address it today and that will be the end of it. But if there’s a lesson from 2016 it’s that a scandal that would normally blow over given enough time can be lethal in the final days of a campaign. In a tied race it’s the last thing any campaign would want.

Of course, everything that was said in that rally should, by all rights, disqualify Trump in the minds of decent people everywhere. I’ll never understand how any of that is considered normal political discourse now. But specifically insulting a group that’s necessary for victory is just plain dumb even for them. All it takes is just a point or two in the right place and it could be the death blow.