In the closing stretch before Election Day, the Trump/Vance campaign held a high-profile rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. The most charitable way to describe it was that it was an unusual final pitch to make to the American people. The New York Times was not overwrought in describing it as “a closing carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.”
Serious parties tout uplifting messages to spur voters and win undecideds. They avoid stupid controversies, but the GOP was its most Trump-induced self in New York City. This was MAGA in its full, er, glory. As a result, the party is spending its final election days doing damage control. (The former president already is claiming election fraud. We knew it was coming, but not this early.)
To recap the lowlights, a comedian called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and made a joke about Latinos and birth control that is too crass to reprint in these pages. A speaker called Vice President Kamala Harris the antichrist. Former Fox host Tucker Carlson said she was trying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”
Some left-wing commentators compared the event to previous fascistic rallies at the same venue. It had eerie parallels but is something of an overstatement. It reminded us more of the cartoonish State of the Union speech given by President Camacho in the 2006 movie “Idiocracy” — a comedy that’s morphed into political documentary.
We were appalled when the GOP ticket falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating people’s cats, but few Republicans expressed outrage. Quite a few — especially in districts with large numbers of Puerto Rican and Latino voters — have condemned the rally remarks. Forgive us for suspecting their guiding moral principle might not be outrage at bigotry, but fear of losing elections.
This editorial board typically finds itself more aligned with conservative ideas of low taxes, limited government and deregulation than the Democratic platform of bigger government. We’ve detailed many of our long-running critiques of Harris and her policies, especially during her years as a California prosecutor and senator. So we’re anguished to see the GOP, the only viable alternative party to the Democratic Party, make this its final pitch.
In his farewell address, President Ronald Reagan spoke of an America as a shining city on a hill, which was “teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Reagan did not see America as “a garbage can for the rest of the world,” as Trump put it in one of his anti-immigrant tirades.
“This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves,” Reagan said in his 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech, setting the tone for the GOP for decades to come.
Unfortunately, what the national GOP has now become is a party with few principles and an inability to check the toxic populism of its figurehead.
However the election turns out, the Republican Party’s long-term success depends on rediscovering Reagan’s welcoming vision and turning away from whatever was on display at Madison Square Garden.
