There will be others to be sure, but none will compare to Madison Square Garden, the site on Sunday of the final MAGA rally, a culmination of the better part of a decade of American politics in which Donald Trump remade the Republican Party, and perhaps to a lesser extent the country, in his own image.
The massive crowd that packed the Garden, where Muhammad Ali first fought Joe Frazier half a century ago, witnessed this GOP realignment in miniature.
It played out on stage during a four-hour procession of businessmen and shock jocks, wrestlers and policy wonks, politicians of varying degrees of esteem and disgrace – everyone who is anyone of importance in the Trump universe. At the midpoint of the programming: Tucker Carlson, who serves as an ad hoc Virgil for the sometimes-confusing landscape of the New Right.
Carlson explained to start that former Vice President Kamala Harris might have her former Republican, in this case Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, but Trump had his own former Democrat to match, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Said the former Fox News host, “It’s a realignment. It is unbelievable!” And Carlson would know. Once a glossy magazine writer, he defended the invasion of Iraq. Now a pundit outside the beltway, he condemns the foreign policy establishment, among all other long-standing power structures, as listless and selfish elite. According to Carlson, the unifying element: Love and hate.
“People know in a country that has been taken over by a leadership class that actually despises them and their values and their history and their culture and their customs – really hates them to the point that it is trying to replace them – when someone actually has affection for them,” he said before adding, as if there could be any confusion, “and that is Donald Trump.”
Trump is their champion. An elite, often ill-defined, their opponent. Only the former president, it seems, can hold together an ideological tent now bursting at the seams with all sorts of ideologies that are at peace for the moment. Enter Speaker Mike Johnson, the highest-ranking elected Republican in office.
Republicans don’t typically enjoy long lifespans once they become speaker, and Johnson has already faced one challenge to his leadership from within his own ranks over foreign aid to Ukraine. Trump helped him put down that coup by offering the speaker his blessing when Johnson made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago in the spring, but not before Carlson could ask Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene if she believed the conservative speaker was being “blackmailed.” She replied that she didn’t know.
Carlson, Greene, and Trump oppose helping Ukraine fight off the Russians. Johnson and the majority of the GOP conference sent military aid anyway. All the same, that foreign policy rift went unmentioned on Sunday other than a passing reference Johnson made to the longstanding GOP belief in “peace through strength.” Widely considered the most socially conservative speaker Republicans have elevated to that position, he lauded “fiscal responsibility,” “free markets,” and “secure borders.”
Securing the southern border has become an article of faith among Republicans in the age of Trump. Fiscal responsibility and free markets, on the other hand, are hardly doctrine anymore. The same GOP that tried in vain to slash President Biden’s budget was happy to explode the deficit under Trump. As far as free markets are concerned, the more libertarian-minded right continues to split with the rest of the party over the tariffs that Trump promises.
But Johnson sought to unify by appealing to the people and defining the opposition. “Everywhere around the country, no matter where you live, everybody is fed up and they are fired up,” reported the still new speaker, and “they know that we cannot afford four more years of Kamala Harris in the White House.”
The crowd may have been slightly unfamiliar with the speaker, who worked with the conservative analogue of the ACLU, a group called Alliance Defending Freedom, filing legal challenges against gay marriage during the Obama presidency.
But they knew Vivek Ramaswamy, the businessman who entered the GOP primary mostly, it seemed, to sing Trump’s praises. A gifted speaker, he painted a picture of national renewal before claiming that “New York is a swing state.” It very much is not, but that was immaterial as the also-ran fired up the hometown crowd. And while decrying the advent of biological men competing in women’s sports, he added a line that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Said Ramaswamy, “Our message to gay Americans is you’re free to marry who you want, if you want, without the government standing in your way.”
Marriage is not on the ballot, but the little-noticed aside illustrates the gulf between the religious right and many of the new Trump converts who could care less about social issues.
The differences between the many and RFK Jr. were easier to spot. Kennedy leaned into his apostate status, telling the crowd that he no longer recognized the Democratic Party and that neither would his famous family.
He did not leave the party, he said in so many words, so much as his party left him. Democrats today, he said, are “the party of Wall Street, of Big Banks, of Big Data, of Big Tech, of the military contractors, Big Pharma, Big AG, Big Food and Big Chemicals.” The congregation in the garden, opposed to anything big, roared.
And then they roared when billionaire Wall Street titan Howard Lutnick introduced another billionaire – Elon Musk, whom the federal government relies upon for rockets, electric vehicles, and the technology keeping Ukrainian soldiers connected to the Pentagon. By way of introduction, Lutnick bellowed that the world’s richest man was also “the greatest capitalist in the history of the United States of America.”
More than one observer compared the rally in the Garden to the Republican National Convention after the first assassination attempt, when the GOP was convinced that they could not lose. If the Sunday rally was an effort to recapture that magic, it was successful. There were no disagreements on stage.
There was indiscretion, though.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe began the evening with a routine that raised eyebrows and prompted disavowals by Republicans in competitive races. He called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” David Rem, a childhood friend of the former president, called the current vice president “the devil.” Not to be outdone, Grant Cardone, a businessman in private equity, said Harris had “pimp handlers.”
The antipathy toward Harris was dark but not unusual for Republicans. The GOP had set aside their own night for vibes. The barb about Puerto Rico, however, was a political liability, and more than one Republican campaign in swing states issued statements decrying the insult comic whom the GOP nominee invited to open his homecoming rally.
For his part, the former president mostly played the hits. He spoke for 90 minutes in all superlatives promising “the biggest” and “the best” and weaving together the common theme of the evening: “We are not just running against Kamala, she means nothing, she is purely a vessel,” Trump said. “We are running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala and more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat Party.”
In opposition to Democrats, Trump has united Republicans. Of course, they didn’t care for the left before he arrived, and the right won’t make peace with the other side of the aisle when he leaves. But someday, Trump will, in fact, leave. Then the GOP will confront an inescapable question: What will become of Trumpism after Trump?
On Sunday, that was far from anyone’s mind. Republicans were unified in opposition not just to Democrats, but to the elite that Carlson warned about at the beginning of the night, because of Trump. One week ahead of the election, the disparate and slightly incongruent populist ideologies were aligned for Trump and the final MAGA rally.
