‘The brainwashing is working’: Nazi comparisons run rampant in the wake of Donald Trump’s rally for the Reich

Not even a week after John Kelly’s concerning statements about Donald Trump falling into “the definition of a fascist” came to light, the Republican nominee held a rally at Madison Square Garden filled with such vitriolic and xenophobic rhetoric that it wouldn’t be a stretch to say it was reminiscent of Third Reich propaganda.

Several media outlets and news stations have been compelled to compare the Oct. 27 rally with the February 1939 pro-Nazi rally that also took place at the New York City arena. And with good reason.

The event started off with a bang. By “bang” we mean we could hear the Trump campaign shooting itself in the foot when it comes to Puerto Rican U.S. voters and U.S. voters of Puerto Rican descent. Edgelord wannabe comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” among other despicable things he remorselessly spouted about the Latino and immigrant communities.

However, the individual who thinks calling himself a comedian gives him carte blanche to be openly racist was only the opening act of what would be a 5-hour event night of venomous speeches that seek to further toxify an already concerningly polarized nation.

Rallying like it’s 1939

In October, historian and journalist Anne Applebaum wrote two Trump-focused articles for The Atlantic published 10 days apart: the first one, dated Oct. 18, analyzed why Donald Trump’s rhetoric could be legitimately compared to that employed by dictators like “Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini;” the second one, published the day after the Madison Square Garden rally, discussed how the language used by the guest speakers, as well as the main orange attraction, is neither accidental nor incidental. She writes:

“Trump’s electorate is being primed to equate his political opposition with infection, pollution, and demonic power, and to accept violence and chaos as a legitimate, necessary response to these primal, lethal threats.”

Let’s illustrate this assessment with real examples coming directly from the billionaire New Yorker himself. Trump’s secret recipe for making people follow him is his (over)confidence, overblown charisma, and unsophisticated and vain but effective rhetoric. So, it should be unsurprising that instead of trying to mitigate the impact of having called fellow Americans “the enemy from within,” he opted to double down on his assertions, first by depersonalizing these Left-leaning people as an “amorphous group” before classifying them as the “enemy”: “This is who we are fighting,” he said.

It’s not just in terms of rhetoric that Trump wishes to take America back in time, it’s also in terms of laws. As he said during his speech, he wishes to make use of “The Alien Enemies Act,” part of the “1798 Alien and Sedition Acts” which was, long story short, President John Adams’s way of legitimizing targeted deportations and silencing dissidents, although at the time, it was “far less concerned with deporting ‘aliens’ than with prosecuting its American critics.” In more recent times, the law was used to justify the harrowing reality of Japanese internment during World War II.

But Trump was not the only one whose presence, words, and demeanor were suggestive of 1940s Nazi Germany. If you think someone choosing the Papyrus font for pretty much anything is in bad taste, take a closer look at Elon Musk’s “dark MAGA” hat:

Some netizens argue that it’s not Fraktur, but even if it were not, it’s definitely a style of blackletter, whose letterforms Fraktur and Textura were particularly embraced by Nazi Germany. That said, it is worth acknowledging that these fonts were banned in 1941 because Hitler labeled them “Jewish letters.”

As if we could not get more on-the-nose, here’s what radio host Sid Rosenberg had to say about being invited to speak at the rally:

This 2024 rally had everything that one could hope to find in a racism-fuelled nightmare blunt rotation: from disgraced, disbarred, now-broke Rudi Giuliani unbridling his Palestinian hatred to creepily unabashed spanking aficionado Tucker Carlson calling VP Kamala Harris “Samoan-Malaysian” before giggling like a horror movie villain who also happens to be a prepubescent school girl. Jokes aside, this kind of rhetoric ought to reasonably frighten anyone. The people it doesn’t frighten, reasonably frighten me.