Donald Trump’s rally in New York City featuring MAGA firebrands like Tucker Carlson and Vivek Ramaswamy served several purposes for the former president's campaign, but a columnist argued the overall message felt like a “promise of an occupation to come.”
“The message the MAGA caravan brought to Madison Square Garden was that their movement will soon be utterly unconstrained,” New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote Monday.
Throughout the event on Sunday which included racist remarks by guest speakers and has been compared by Trump’s opponents to a 1939 pro-Nazi rally, there was “the sense that Trump’s followers would reject a Harris victory, but Tucker Carlson, in his manic, giddy speech, made it overt,” according to Goldberg.
She continued by writing that while Carlson’s speech was “deeply dishonest,” his talk about Trump liberating his supporters still contained "an essential truth about the nature of Trump’s bond with his base."
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“He’s liberated us in the deepest and truest sense,” Carlson said, according to the opinion piece. “And the liberation he has brought to us is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies. Donald Trump has made it possible for the rest of us to tell the truth about the world around us.”
Carlson is right, according to Goldberg, because as she argues, while Trump set the conservative host “free to express the rancid truths of his heart,” he most significantly has given not only Carlson but also “the rest of his followers permission to dismiss the idea that he could lose fairly, given how much love there is for him even in the supposedly hostile territory of Manhattan.”
“Delivered in the center of a city with more immigrants than any other, it felt like the inside-out promise of an occupation to come. Election Day, Trump said, would be ‘liberation day.’ Sunday was a glimpse of what his version of liberation means,” Goldberg wrote.