At Madison Square Garden, the wide world of Trump

An extensive poll done last month by NBC News and Telemundo showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump by 54% to 40% among Hispanic voters. That 40%, should Trump actually achieve it, would equal the best Republican performance among Latino voters ever by President George W. Bush in 2004. (Remember that Trump won about 28% of the Latino vote in 2016 and about 32% in 2020. Both figures were significantly better than Mitt Romney and John McCain in the two elections before Trump.) The NBC-Telemundo poll showed Trump doing particularly well among male Latino voters, with whom Trump and Harris were tied, 47% to 47%.

These are extraordinary numbers, and they are particularly worrisome to strategists who have seen Harris’s support decline in some key areas of the Democratic Party coalition. They would find no solace at the Madison Square Garden rally.

Among the first people I met inside the Garden, as everyone waited for the program to begin, were Marc Vazquez and Engel Paulino, two friends from Brick Township, New Jersey. Vazquez’s family came to the New York area from Puerto Rico, while Paulino’s came from the Dominican Republic. Both are active in their local Republican Party.

Vazquez, who is 30 years old and works in marketing, explained that when he was younger, “I always believed I was a Democrat because that’s what my family identified as.” Republicans, he believed, were rich, out of touch, and didn’t care about people like him. Then, in 2014, around the time he turned 20, he started a business — it dealt with repairing phones and tablets — and found himself dealing with quite a few conservatives. They said all sorts of things critical of then-President Barack Obama. Vazquez found that frustrating and started doing some reading. “I realized they were right,” he said.

Trump joined the presidential race the next year. Vazquez was originally skeptical — initial skepticism is a common element of many rallygoers’ stories — but he was also intrigued by how much the media seemed to hate Trump. That is another common element of the stories. A lot of Trump supporters say they were originally struck by what they saw as a hostile media overreaction to Trump — in Vazquez’s case, it was over the issue of illegal immigration — and that it spurred them to take a closer look at Trump.

Vazquez found that he agreed with Trump on immigration. “It wasn’t about hate. It was about putting America first, making sure our laws were respected, and ensuring our communities were safe,” he said. Vazquez also found himself supporting Trump’s tax cuts, energy policies, deregulation, and more. He thought Trump “was focused on creating real opportunities, particularly for communities like mine, which had been overlooked by politicians for years.” In 2019, five years after he showed his first interest in politics, Vazquez joined the Brick Township Republican Party, in which he is now on the board. That’s how he ended up wearing a MAGA hat on the floor of Madison Square Garden, waiting for the biggest political rally in decades.

Engel Paulino wore a MAGA hat, too, a baseball cap turned backward, plus a “NEVER SURRENDER” T-shirt featuring the famous photo of Trump raising his fist after he was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania. (As an aside, I’ve covered a lot of Trump rallies, and I’ve never seen as much MAGA merchandise as I did Sunday night.) Paulino described living as a small child in the Dominican Republic, where his father had a furniture business. “A hurricane came by and destroyed the business, and my dad had a choice — either rebuild or listen to my mother and start a new life in the U.S.,” Paulino said. They came to New Jersey.

In New Jersey, Paulino recalled, “I watched my dad, as a truck driver, work 13-hour days. He would be gone for days at a time. He had a bed in his truck. And I watched him achieve the American dream. He went from a small one-bedroom apartment to a four-bedroom house in a matter of five to seven years.” His father is now a Pentecostal minister in Asbury Park.

Seeing his father’s work pay off had a deep effect on Paulino. He developed an interest in real estate and is now a realtor. He did not pay much attention to politics until Trump won the presidency in 2016. Like Vazquez, he was fascinated by the strong media antipathy to Trump. “I always wondered, ‘Why do they hate him so much?’” he said. He started paying more attention to politics and found that he agreed with what Trump was doing. He did some reading on the basic tenets of the Republican Party. “And most of those things I resonated with,” he said. “I believe in keeping the family together. I believe in having the opportunity to start your own business and grow. And I’m a Christian. I believe in protecting our religious views.” In 2020, Paulino voted for the first time, for Donald Trump.

Finally, Paulino said he strongly supports closing the U.S.-Mexico border. He also strongly opposes illegal immigrants receiving government benefits. “Americans should come first,” he declared. But he went on to add: “In my dad’s church, it’s a Hispanic church, there are a lot of illegals, there are a lot of immigrants. So, I feel for that community as well. I’m not ‘deport them all and get rid of them.’ I understand also from their perspective, especially the Dreamers, the ones who were brought to this country as a child, went to school here, and all they know is the U.S. I wish Trump was a little more lenient about that.”

As we talked, I heard a commotion behind me, and Paulino looked over my shoulder and said, “Oh, my gosh — I love her.” It was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), making her way through the crowd.

We parted ways, and the program began. Something happened early in the proceedings that would become the object of hugely negative news coverage. Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian and podcaster booked by the Trump campaign, did a kind of insult comic/roast routine that fell mostly flat with the audience. “There’s a lot going on,” Hinchcliffe said. “Like, I don’t know if you guys know this, but there is literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” The line did not get many laughs and quite a few groans, but it exploded on X. Trump detractors quickly denounced the rally as a “hatefest.”

It was a crude joke that led many to think: Why would the campaign book an insult comic for this event? It wasn’t a roast on cable TV. But there Hinchcliffe was, and the Trump adversaries who were ready to denounce the rally quickly made it Exhibit A in the night’s case against Trump. I texted Vazquez, with roots in Puerto Rico, and Paulino, with roots in the Dominican Republic, to see what they thought. Vazquez replied that he didn’t like what Hinchcliffe said but that “comedians often use exaggeration and sarcasm, and while this particular remark may have been harsh, it was intended as a joke rather than a factual statement.” As for whether it should be blowing up the internet, he noted that all of us encounter a wide range of material on the net, “and it’s up to individuals to decide whether to engage or simply scroll past content they find distasteful. We should be careful not to overreact to every comment, especially those intended to be a joke.”

As for Paulino, he wrote back later that night to say he is a comedy fan and knows Hinchcliffe’s style. “He’s known to be edgy — if you ever check out his show Kill Tony, you’ll see.” Paulino said when the comic made the “garbage” remark, he looked over at Vazquez and made a shocked face, and they both laughed. “Never thought about it again once he moved on to other jokes,” Paulino continued. “I honestly had no idea it would make headline news. It wasn’t until later I went on X and saw that AOC and Tim Walz were freaking out over it.” He saw the episode as something being blown out of proportion by anti-Trump media. “I have many Puerto Rican friends that will be voting for Trump,” he said. “I think it’s safe to assume Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke isn’t going to change that. No one at all is even talking about it in person. I’m still on the train with a lot of supporters. But for some reason, the internet can’t get over it.” The Trump campaign quickly issued a statement saying, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

There were other vulgar moments in the five-plus hour rally. The New York radio personality Sid Rosenberg was pretty unpleasant, as was a businessman named Grant Cardone. But the striking thing about the episode was the way in which media coverage blotted out the vast majority of what was said during the evening — the talk about Trump’s record on the economy, on the border, on national security, and the criticisms of the Biden-Harris record on those same issues and more. Surely that would merit some discussion, wouldn’t it? Without ignoring what Hinchcliffe and a few others said, couldn’t the reporting have given a more complete account of a very long event?

Look at the headlines. The New York Times topped its main article with “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism.” The Washington Post headline was “Trump rally speakers lob racist insults, call Puerto Rico ‘island of garbage.’” Resistance programming like Morning Joe did what it always does in such situations. It all meshed well with the Harris campaign’s messaging on the rally.

The New York Times report had one thing right: “It was all a surreal scene.” Indeed, it was. Looking at the list of speakers, there was the name Scott LoBaido, described as a “live painter.” Sure enough, LoBaido, an artist originally from Staten Island with a lot of resentment against the Manhattan art world — he gave them the finger at the end of his routine — came onstage with a blank canvas and painted a picture of the American flag and Trump, all in the time it took to play a recording of “America the Beautiful.” Later, wrestler Hulk Hogan reprised his act from the Republican National Convention. Then, a man billed as a childhood friend of Trump, David Rem, pulled a crucifix out of his pocket and waved it as he praised Trump, criticized New York Mayor Eric Adams, and offered to campaign in Spanish for Trump in the swing states.

It was all evidence of the fact that, in his 78 years as a New Yorker, Trump has collected a colorful cast of characters around him. And, of course, he’s one, too. That’s one of the things that makes him interesting and has sometimes made it hard for him to fill the conventional role of president of the United States. The Madison Square Garden rally, a sprawling, audacious political achievement by a Republican candidate in one of the deepest blue places in the country, was also an achievement in showmanship because that’s just who Donald Trump is.