Know Who Else Rallied at Madison Square Garden? The Left Finally Stretches the ‘Nazi’ Charge to Its Breaking Point

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the Left’s wild overreaction to former president Donald Trump’s recent rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, and we cover more media misses.

Trump’s MSG Rally Pushes MSNBC Over the Edge

The chyron MSNBC displayed under its coverage of former president Donald Trump’s MSG rally over the weekend was one for the Hall of Infamy: “Trump’s MSG rally comes 85 years after pro-nazi rally at famed arena.”

The chyron perfectly captures the Left’s hysterical closing argument one week out from the election: “Trump is Hitler and everything he does on the campaign trail proves it.”

For fear they were being too subtle with their fascism argument, the network played footage from a “pro-America” Nazi rally held by an American pro-Hitler organization at MSG in 1939 during its coverage of Trump’s rally.

“But that jamboree happening right now, you see it there on your screen in that place is particularly chilling because in 1939, more than 20,000 supporters of a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the Garden for a so-called pro-America rally,” the network told viewers.

And it wasn’t just MSNBC that jumped on the not-so-apt comparison.

Kamala Harris’s running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, claimed during his own event in Las Vegas on Sunday that the Trump rally had a “direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid 1930s at Madison Square Garden.”

“And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there. So, look, we said we’re all running like everything’s on the line because it is,” he told supporters.

The crowd for the “Hitler rally” was surprisingly diverse, filled with Jewish, Hispanic, and black New Yorkers, as NR’s Caroline Downey reported from the event.

That didn’t stop Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from telling MSNBC viewers on Morning Joe that the Trump event was a “hate rally.”

“This was not just a presidential rally, this was not just a campaign rally. I think it’s important for people to understand these are mini January 6 rallies, these are mini Stop the Steal rallies,” she said. (While the progressive Squad member’s warnings were largely overblown, speakers like Tucker Carlson did seem to suggest the election could be stolen, with the former Fox News host saying it would be “pretty tough” for Democrats to say Harris “got 85 million votes because she’s so impressive.”)

See more

“This was a hate rally. This was not just a presidential rally, this was not just a campaign rally. I think it’s important for people to understand these are mini January 6 rallies, these are mini Stop the Steal rallies.” –@aoc @repaoc on Trump’s New York City rally pic.twitter.com/c57RXnVo3d

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) October 28, 2024

Ocasio-Cortez and MSNBC pointed to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” as an example of the hate at the rally. But the Trump campaign sought to distance itself from the ill-received joke. “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” senior campaign adviser Danielle Alvarez said in a statement.

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton of course never misses an opportunity to take a shot at her former political rival. She appeared on CNN to accuse Trump of “actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939.”

“President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany. So I don’t think we can ignore it,” said Clinton, who unsuccessfully ran for president against Trump in 2016.

“Now, it may be a leap for some people and a lot of others may think, ‘I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to say that.’ But please open your eyes to the danger that this man poses to our country, because I think it is clear and present for anybody paying attention,” she added.

But apparently someone forgot to remind Clinton that her own husband, former president Bill Clinton, accepted the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination at the very same venue, which has in fact hosted four DNCs and one RNC.

Print media, meanwhile, made a more subtle comparison. Time magazine offered readers a look into “How the Trump Rally at Madison Square Garden Follows a Long Tradition in Politics.” Nestled in between more normal American political events was a section dedicated to the Nazi rally.

All of this comes after President Joe Biden and a host of other prominent Democrats and elite opinion makers urged everyone to lower the political temperature after the first failed Trump assassination attempt.

That didn’t last long.

Headline Fail of the Week

“Donald Trump has claimed without evidence that Ms. Harris never worked at the fast-food chain. Her campaign and a friend say she did,” a New York Times report says.

Yet it fails to acknowledge that the friend who serves as a source in the article is actually a campaign surrogate.

The outlet described Wanda Kagan as someone “who had known Ms. Harris as a teenager and remained in touch with the family for years afterward.”

“Answering questions by email, Ms. Kagan said that Ms. Harris’s mother, who died in 2009, had told Ms. Kagan about the summer job years ago. Ms. Kagan said she herself had also worked at one of the fast-food chain’s many franchises in those years,” the report reads. “‘That’s what us regular folks did,’ Ms. Kagan wrote. Still, she indicated that it had not been a frequent topic of conversation for Ms. Harris. ‘We didn’t talk much about our McDonald’s days back then,’ she said.”

But Kagan is more than just a childhood friend. She spoke at the DNC in Chicago, co-hosted the “Survivors for Kamala Harris” online campaign event, and recently visited the White House to celebrate Harris’s birthday, according to the Washington Free-Beacon.

The report could just as easily have read, “Kamala Harris claimed without evidence that she worked at McDonald’s.”

Media Misses

• Radio host Charlamagne tha God must have missed out on the recent Trump MSG news cycle, because he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that news networks aren’t spending enough time calling Trump a fascist on-air.

“It’s crazy because you still don’t have news networks having that conversation, like when somebody says, when somebody questions Kamala Harris’s Blackness or is she a DEI hire, you all will have roundtable discussions about that, asking that question. How come we’re not having a roundtable discussion asking is Donald Trump a fascist? Actually not even asking, he’s stating it,” Charlamagne said, leading Cooper to defend himself by saying he talks about it “every night.”

• The View’s Joy Behar is having a self-admitted “breakdown” from her election-related anxiety, leading her to attack undecided voters in the final stretch. “Get off the fence, all right?” she said. “It’s a presidential candidate with credentials versus some kind of a nutcase. That’s what you are up against. Stop with the fence already, I’m sick of it. I can’t take this anymore.”

“You see I’m having a breakdown. I can’t wait for Election Day, so I can sleep at night!” she added.

• A CBS News producer in Gaza has a history of making controversial comments about Israel and Jews, as NR’s Ryan Mills recently reported. Mills writes: “In Facebook posts, Al Ghoul has displayed a clear anti-Israel bias and has regularly alleged that Israel is engaged in a genocide. He and his son, a cameraman, appear to have praised terror attacks against civilians and even questioned the humanity of Jews. Al Ghoul’s son identifies himself on social media as a CBS worker. CBS denies that the network employs or pays Al Ghoul’s son.”