The New Yorker:

Nine years in, Trump is in reach of another term as the technocrats struggle to contain him.

By Susan B. Glasser

On Sunday evening, high up in the rafters at Madison Square Garden, I watched thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters come alive as the former President, at long last, took the stage in what was meant to be the grand home-town finale of his nine years of campaigning for the White House. The maga superfans around me—most of them men—had waited patiently for nearly five hours. They had cheered at the mere mention of Trump’s name and applauded—some more enthusiastically than others—as a parade of warm-up acts slung hate speech with reckless abandon. Of course, they loved it when the ex-President savaged Kamala Harris as a “very low-I.Q. individual”; when he claimed that Harris had personally unleashed hordes of foreign criminals, mental patients, and gang members to rampage through American cities; when he said of his political opponents, “they are indeed the enemy within.”

By now, you’ve most certainly heard about the most shocking comments from the rally at the Garden: the comic who joked about Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”; the childhood friend of Trump’s who called Harris “the Antichrist,” while wielding a crucifix before the audience like some medieval Crusader; Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, Jr., promoting the white-supremacist “replacement” theory that claims Democrats want to get rid of native-born Americans and put foreign people of color in their place. When Trump’s longtime adviser and chief anti-immigration ideologue, Stephen Miller, said, “America is for Americans and Americans only,” did he know that it was a direct echo of the Ku Klux Klan’s “America for Americans” slogan? Or the Nazis’ “Germany for the Germans”? It did not seem like a question that needed to be asked—it had already been answered. I can assure you that the night was not, as Trump tried to claim a couple days later, “an absolute love fest.”

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