Last Night’s Rally, From Afar

We are in Paris for a while, which means that last night’s Madison Square Garden rally began during prime time and ended after our bedtime. We watched the bulk of it, but missed comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, about whom more later.

The lineup was odd, I thought. JD Vance, the best speaker in the group, went relatively early on. Speakers included Hulk Hogan, Dr. Phil and Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, among many others. I think we have seen enough of Hulk, and I am not sure what Phil and Lutnick were doing there.

Eventually Elon Musk came on; he said very little, and mostly introduced a visibly nervous Melania Trump, who in turn introduced her husband. We saw the first 30 minutes or so of Trump’s speech. He was somewhat subdued, sticking pretty close to the script and hammering his best issue, immigration. Highly effective, in other words.

So the event was pretty anodyne. What was most jarring to me was the pacifist tone taken by some speakers. Joe Biden was denounced as a warmonger. But to be a warmonger, don’t you have to start at least one war? Biden is a terrible commander in chief, as manifested in his withdrawal from Afghanistan, but he didn’t display there the instincts of a warmonger. The opposite, if anything. And it may be reasonable to blame Biden, in part, for the wars that have broken out in Ukraine and Israel, but that is on account of weakness, not militarism.

Worse, in my view, were the denunciations of Dick Cheney and, implicitly, George W. Bush. The days when Republicans stood for a vigorous national defense are apparently gone. When Lutnick shouted “Crush the jihad!” it was a jarring echo of a vanished era. And more than one speaker criticized our support for both Ukraine and Israel from what can only be described as an isolationist perspective.

So last night’s successful, if rather tame, rally leaves the Democrats as the only party to hold a Nazi-themed event in recent years.

As for the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, we missed him, so I watched his bit on YouTube this morning. He was mildly amusing and inoffensive for the most part, but he made jokes about Puerto Ricans and others that were arguably racist. They were the kind of joke that comedians like Don Rickles told in the 1960s. But the Democrats have seized on Hinchcliffe’s appearance and made it the only “news” story to emerge from the rally.

Which makes one wonder: why did the Trump campaign think it was a good idea to put Hinchcliffe on stage? I’m told that his material last night was relatively mild; frequently, he is more controversial. The Trump team knew that the Democrats had gone all-in on characterizing last night’s event as a neo-Nazi rally. Trump’s speech made that charge look silly, but his campaign allowed the Democrats to claim vindication by needlessly featuring Hinchcliffe.

This is the kind of unforced error that we have come to expect from the Trump campaign. But it probably won’t make any difference, as the tide continues to run in Trump’s direction.

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