Trump revives the populist legacy of Madison Square politics
National Post, 24 November 2024
Yes, there was a pro-Nazi rally at MSG in 1939. But it was also the site of FDR's fiery speech of 1936 and rallies by presidents Truman and Dewey
The former and future president, Donald Trump, made a triumphant return to Madison Square Garden last weekend. He flew in on Trump Force One from Mar-a-Lago last Saturday for a boisterous evening of mixed martial arts — heretofore not the usual arts enjoying presidential patronage — with what columnist Terry Glavin has called in these pages his retinue of “circus freaks and Bond villains.”
If there is one place that would be unfazed by the spectacle of Saturday night, it would be Madison Square Garden, now in its fourth iteration in Manhattan — and, for nearly a century, no longer near Madison Square. It has hosted professional wrestling and Billy Joel on a long-term residency, as well as a papal Mass. It was Trump’s second visit to MSG in a month.
In last days of the election campaign, the president went to Madison Square Garden in New York City and revelled in the disdain of the elites, the powerful interests, the wealthy classes, though he himself was a wealthy New Yorker whose family gave him all the advantages in life.
“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”
Presidential candidates boasting about being hated! Imagine.
But the president wearing elite hatred as a badge of honour was not Trump in 2024, who held a rally at MSG 10 days before the election, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936. He delivered a fiery, populist address at MSG on Oct. 31, 1936, four days before a smashing landslide victory: 46 states to two over Alf Landon, 523 – eight in the electoral college, with some 60 per cent of the popular vote.
It is a mark of how poorly Americans know their history that Hillary Clinton and Tim Walz blasted Trump’s rally as being on the site of a 1939 pro-Nazi rally, rather than giving pride of place to FDR, the greatest Democrat of them all. Indeed, FDR at MSG in 1936 remains one of more important speeches of his presidency.
MSNBC ran a chyron on the screen reading, “Trump’s MSG rally comes 85 years after pro-Nazi rally at famed arena.” It could have just as easily run, “Trump’s MSG rally pays homage to the populism of FDR.” But it didn’t.
To be sure, there was a pro-Nazi rally at MSG in February 1939. The German American Bund organized it, but ran into overwhelming opposition. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia deployed the largest police presence in New York’s history, more to protect, rather than contain, the Nazi fellow travellers. There were some 100,000 counter-protesters outside who, absent police restraint, would have administered some mixed martial arts of their own to those inside. From that day on, the German American Bund began to fizzle out.
Have no Democrats read Conrad Black’s acclaimed biography of FDR? I did. Black writes of Roosevelt’s “brilliant performance” at MSG, where “a little like the masses in George Orwell’s 1984 being stirred to rage … the crowd in Madison Square Garden was roused to a frenzy of fist-shaking wrath against the unnamed moral outcasts of American society.”
FDR contrasted his first term, devoted to dealing with the Depression, with the 12 previous years of Republican presidencies — Harding, Coolidge, Hoover — in which the Roaring Twenties came crashing down in 1929.
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