By james art After the 2016 election, after everyone recovered from the shock, analyzes of what happened began to turn into the conventional wisdom that claimed Donald Trump won because a bunch of white people without college degrees were experiencing “economic anxiety.” So we got thousands of stories and articles from reporters sent to diners in rural Pennsylvania and church socials in Iowa to find out what Trump voters really want. But the fact was, it was an extremely close Electoral College victory that could have gone either way by just a handful of votes in a few swing states. The main data guru at the time, Nate Silver, did a post-election analysis that showed that whenever there was an event, like Hillary Clinton briefly collapsing at a 9/11 event or the Washington Post’s reporting of Donald Trump’s crude comment about ” Access to Hollywood,” there will be a slight dip in the polls for the affected candidate, but they will return to their usual doldrums within a few weeks.
If there is a lesson from 2016, it is that a scandal that would normally die down after enough time can be fatal in the final days of a campaign.
Trump was still struggling to recover from the “Access Hollywood” scandal in late October 2016, and Clinton was leading in the aggregate polls by about 6 points. Then FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress announcing that the agency was following up on the Clinton email investigation, and the media went wild again with the story that had gripped them for months. Clinton’s polls immediately dropped and never had a chance to recover because Election Day was too soon. The rest is history.
Silver assembled plenty of evidence to support his theory that Comey’s letter and the ensuing media frenzy so close to the election were crucial to Clinton’s loss. Why am I bringing this up now? Well, this event happened exactly eight years ago today. You may recall the famous front page of the New York Times the next morning:
The polls are much tighter today than they were in 2016. But as this year proved, every little mistake can make a big difference because there’s no time to recover. And it’s possible that Trump did one yesterday with his terrifying rally at Madison Square Garden in New York.
The event was packed and lasted for many hours, as is usually the case at his rallies. The speakers were almost uniformly rude, extreme and offensive in one way or another. It got off to a roaring start with radio host Sid Rosenberg calling second gentleman Doug Emhoff a “shithole Jew” and keeping his cool by saying, “She’s some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton. What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party. Every single one of them. So it was nice.
Another speaker, David Rehm, who is supposed to be a childhood friend of Trump’s (obviously not true), said: “Kamala Harris is the devil! She’s the Antichrist!” A real estate expert (?) named Grant Cardone took to the podium to declare that the former California attorney general, senator and current vice president is “the least qualified person to ever run for office any office in America’ and claims to have a ‘pimp manipulator’ which I think has a pretty clear meaning.
After Trump put a lot of pressure on American Muslims to vote for him the day before, Rudy Giuliani appeared and blasted the Palestinians:
The Palestinians are taught to kill us at the age of two. They won’t let a Palestinian into Jordan… into Egypt. And Harris wants to bring them to you.
Trump’s transition chief, Howard Lutnick, shouted “we must crush Jihad!” and continued around the 1890s when America was great, until Trump’s top adviser Stephen Miller really brought home the 1939 mood with his declaration that “America is for Americans!” (It sounded better in the original German: Only for Deutsche a real Nazi slogan.) RFK Jr. was also there, ranting about the “corruption at the CDC, FDA, NIH, and CIA.” Trump later promised him, “I’m going to let him run wild on health. I’ll let him run wild about the foods. I’m going to let him go wild on the meds.” And Tucker Carlson took the stage to thunderous applause, laughing maniacally and hurling a crude racial slur at Kamala Harris:
These are just the highlights of some of the inaugural speeches before Trump appeared and did his usual stupid thing that sent people out of the hall in droves.
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But there was one very special speech given by a “comedian” at the start of the event. His name is Tony Hinchcliffe and apparently he has a very popular podcast. He set the whole event in motion with this line:
He also had a gag about hanging out with a black friend and instead of carving pumpkins, they carved a watermelon. But this “joke” from Puerto Rico caused a sensation and not in vain. In this tight race, Trump is counting on his inroads among Latino voters to make up for his losses among college-educated white suburbanites. The line immediately went viral.
As luck would have it, Kamala Harris happened to be in Pennsylvania at that exact moment, making an ad to Puerto Rican voters (there are nearly half a million of them in the state) when news of the slur hit the Internet. Within minutes, we saw Puerto Rican megastar Bad Bunny, soon followed by Ricky Martin and J.Lo (with a combined 315 million followers on Instagram alone), all supporting Harris and criticizing Trump. Florida politicians immediately began condemning the comment. The Trump campaign was soon forced to come forward and say it did not reflect their position. All this happened while the rally was still going on!
Is it another tempest in a teapot? It could be. Trump is a master at avoiding any responsibility. He said nothing about it in his own speech, but perhaps he will look at it today and that will be the end of it. But if there’s a lesson from 2016, it’s that a scandal that would normally die down after enough time can be deadly in the final days of a campaign. In a close race, this is the last thing any campaign would want.
Of course, anything that was said at that rally should by all rights disqualify Trump in the minds of decent people everywhere. I will never understand how any of this counts as normal political discourse now. But specifically insulting a group that is necessary to win is just plain dumb even for them. All it takes is a dot or two in the right place and it can be the death blow.
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