On Oct. 27, 2024, the average New Yorker couldn’t walk around Manhattan without noticing a sea of red hats. Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, held a rally at Madison Square Garden just over a week before the highly anticipated neck-to-neck election—accumulating tens of thousands of Trump supporters in New York City.
Some were surprised to see such a large turnout in New York City, which has historically been very blue; however, some rally attendees were not from the city, and the audience quickly expanded beyond New York’s borders. As expected, attendees came from nearby Connecticut and Pennsylvania, but journalists also encountered Trump supporters who had driven hours from as far away as South Carolina, California and Florida.
People began to line up for a seat the night before. With the rally scheduled for 5 p.m., some supporters began waiting outside Madison Square Garden and sleeping overnight in line. Around 19,500 people attended the rally, and another 10,000 lined the streets. This turnout appears to be a massive spike in numbers of Trump’s recent events–his average crowd size in 2024 has been 5,600.
To excite the crowd before Trump arrived, the campaign featured numerous speakers, including the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dr. Phil and many others.
Although Trump described the rally as an “absolute lovefest,” some sources disagree; some attendees viewed the event as a way to distance themselves from “the other side.” Trump himself referred to Democrats—as he put it, “the other side”—as “the enemy from within.” This sentiment was not only expressed by Trump but also by many of the speakers who attended the event. Sid Rosenberg, a conservative radio personality in New York, did not hold back in expressing his views, stating, “The whole f**king party, a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew-haters and lowlives. Every one of them.”
While many speakers used similar rhetoric to emphasize their separation from the other party, some openly directed their disdain at Kamala Harris. Among them, popular conservative commentator Tucker Carlson mocked Harris’s mixed race, referring to her as a “Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor.” David Rem, introduced at the rally as Trump’s lifelong friend, went so far as to label Harris as “the devil” and “the antichrist.” Given that 59% of regularly practicing religious voters supported Trump in 2020, this religious language has the potential to significantly affect this audience.
Among the offensive comments made by speakers at the rally, those that drew the most media attention were the jokes by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. Hinchcliffe’s remarks in which he referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” drew immediate backlash. With Latino voters making up 15% of eligible voters in the 2024 election, this comment could even have an impact on the polls. The senior adviser to the Trump campaign, Danielle Alvarez, quickly released a statement on this subject, stating, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
Regardless of the statement released by Trump’s campaign, Trump himself has stated he didn’t know the comic or the joke Hinchcliffe made at the rally. Regarding the recent rally, an anonymous communications and media studies student shared, “Seeing all the commotion in town not only scared me, but it made me fear what the results of the election may be.”
Offering a deeper critique of the discussion at the rally, an anonymous junior in political science stated, “Trump’s comments, his team’s comments, and his guest speaker’s comments were racist, vile, xenophobic, and unacceptable. Unfortunately, we’ve known Donald Trump’s views and what he condones for decades, and this instance of white supremacy is no exception. This kind of language should disqualify him (if not his 34 felonies) from running for any kind of office ever again.”
This Tuesday, Nov. 5, Americans will head to the polls, and the nation will see if the rally’s rhetoric influenced public opinion. For some university students, the rally stirred various concerns that will be motivating them to head to the polls and vote. With rising political tensions in New York from both sides and election polls reporting that the race is expected to close, many university students feel their participation can impact the future of their communities for the next four years. Nonetheless, Trump’s MSG rally was a partisan display of his own confidence to win the presidency.
