Trump's rally in New York reflects a party where hate speech has gone mainstream

The tone, set from the top of the Republican ticket, builds on racial tropes from Trump’s 2016 campaign, which he initiated by claiming Mexican immigrants brought drugs, crime and rape to the United States. At the time, Trump’s language shocked a political class — including Republicans — that typically policed overt racism, and many publicly objected to his comments.

In the years since, however, these guardrails have largely disappeared on the right, with extremism analysts warning that Trump-style bigotry now flows virtually unchecked through all levels of the party and has come to define core parts of the Republican agenda.

“He broke down the barriers that kept us, at least in political culture, from going to the darkest places in this country,” said Kevin Boyle, chairman of Northwestern University’s history department. “We had reached a point in American public life where that kind of brazenly racist language was not acceptable in mainstream politics.”

Now, he said, “those boundaries appear to have been lifted.”

The escalation comes in a campaign in which Trump is locked in a neck-and-neck race with Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color ever nominated for president by a major party. Speakers on Sunday aimed for particular vitriol at Harris, with comments likening the Democratic nominee to a prostitute with “pimps” and discrediting her as “low IQ” and “the Antichrist.” On stage, Trump referred to Democrats as “the enemy within,” repeating language that critics say reflects authoritarian rhetoric.

“The day I take the oath of office,” Trump promised, “the migrant invasion of our country will end and the recovery of our country will begin!”

The spectacle at Madison Square Garden drew comparisons to a pro-Nazi rally at the same location in 1939, underscoring fears for many marginalized communities that prejudices would turn into policy if Trump wins a second term.

The Trump campaign has distanced itself from insults about Puerto Rico by comic and podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe, saying the material did not represent the candidate’s views. There was no denial of Hinchcliffe’s other racist jokes or of offensive tropes used by other speakers, such as labeling Palestinians as stone-throwing terrorists.

Trump on Tuesday refused to acknowledge any reaction to the event at Madison Square Garden, saying that “the love in that room was breathtaking.”

The trickle-down effect of Trump’s frequent use of bigoted language can be seen in the growing number of Republican candidates and officials expressing contempt for racial and religious minorities. In Idaho, a Republican senator recently told a Native American candidate to “go back to where she came from.” In Tennessee, a Republican lawmaker said Jewish financier George Soros was “a money changer of the worst kind.”

And at a gym in Michigan, just before Trump appeared at a campaign rally, organizers showed images of heavily tattooed, menacing-looking Latino men, with the caption: “Your new apartment managers if Kamala is re-elected.”

Extremism trackers say stoking racial animus for political gain is not new, but the scope and intensity of hate speech today signals a GOP consumed by Trump’s mainstreaming of the far-right ideologies behind some of the bloodiest attacks in recent American history.

“That meeting was a return to the kind of racist, sexist, homophobic rhetoric that is becoming increasingly normalized in American discourse,” said Raul Perez, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of La Verne who wrote the book, “The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy.”

Jewish advocacy groups noted that the rally at Madison Square Garden took place the same night that Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue marked the anniversary of a 2018 rampage by a white supremacist fixated on the Replacement Theory, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in the U.S. history.

“The brazen racism on display at this MSG rally is shocking, even for this campaign,” Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, wrote on X. “The goal is to desensitize us to this hate. Don’t let it happen.”

Sunday’s rally was just the latest example of how Trump has made bigotry central to his campaign. In September, Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, used their far-reaching megaphones to spread claims about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, even after local authorities insisted the stories had no merit.

Trump repeated the attacks from the presidential debate phase and his words animated far-right movements, whose threats closed schools and drove many Haitians inside. White supremacists marched through Springfield carrying swastika flags; Other masked extremists were filmed in the city holding a banner that read: “Haitians have no home here.”