The Media Research Center was already whining about coverage of Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden before it even happened. Comedy cop Alex Christy groused in an Oct. 25 post:
Perhaps one reason The Atlantic story alleging Trump is a secret Hitler fan has flopped is because Trump’s critics, such as CBS’s Stephen Colbert, see fascism in the littlest of things. On Thursday’s taping of The Late Show, Colbert tried to suggest that Trump’s desire to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden is some sort of attempt to recall the pro-Nazi rally that took place there in 1939.
Colbert declared, “I don’t think winning or losing has anything to do with this. Aides say for three straight presidential campaigns Trump has mused about holding a rally at Madison Square Garden adding, ‘he has just been obsessed with this.’”
Everyone knows Trump loves rallies, crowds, and a good story, so holding a large, headline-grabbing rally in the world’s most famous arena in his former hometown makes sense given his personality. Colbert, however, wasn’t so sure, “It’s just, it’s just a coincidence. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that in 1939 they held a pro-Nazi rally there. Yeah, it was, it was a stain on MSG’s history and I imagine a very uncomfortable courtside seat for Spike Lee.”
You know who else loved rallies, crowds and a good story?
Later that day, Tim Graham had a latent spasm of Clinton Derangement Syndrome:
Hillary Clinton appeared on the Kaitlan Collins show on CNN to elaborate on the theme that Donald Trump is a fascist. She implied Trump’s upcoming rally at Madison Square Garden will resemble the Nazis rallying there in 1939. She’s a bitter clinger.
“One other thing that you’ll see next week, Kaitlan, is Trump actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939. I write about this in my book,” Clinton announced. “President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany. So I don’t think we can ignore it.”
Twitchy noted that Tammy Bruce reminded Hillary on Twitter than Pope Francis had a rally at Madison Square Garden in 2015….and Bill Clinton accepted the Democrat nomination for president there in 1992. Nobody at CNN “fact checks” Trump being accused of being a Nazi.
After the rally, the MRC raged that the its dark undertones were pointed out and joined ConWeb components WorldNetDaily and Newsmax in defending it. First up was Curtis Houck:
ABC’s Good Morning America began another workday spewing more thick venom in the direction of former President Trump and his tens of millions of supporters, blasting Sunday’s Madison Square Garden rally as “dark,” “filled with grievances,” “incendiary,” “outright racist,” “profane,” and “vulgar” thanks to Trump as well as a litany of warm-up acts.
In contrast, ABC offered nary a negative word about Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, touting her as “sprinting toward the finish line, blitzing the battlegrounds, hoping to drive voters to the polls” and “leaning on her most powerful supporters to hammer home what’s at stake,” including a “searing” defense of abortion by former First Lady Michelle Obama.
As always, co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos set the table, look at this framing in an opening tease:
[…]Stephanopoulos later had the setup to idolatrous Trump-hating correspondent Rachel Scott, denouncing the rally’s “profane and racist” turn. The latter concurred that Trump’s “rhetoric has turned increasingly dark and filled with grievances” and the Madison Square Garden rally was “completely overshadowed by comments that were vulgar and, at times, just outright racist.”
[…]Scott hit more predictable notes, including her declaration that the Trump campaign should have known Tony Hinchcliffe would say something controversial like he did about Puerto Ricans.
How can one be “idolatrous” and “Trump-hating” at the same time? Doesn’t the fact that Scott allegedly hates Trump mean she’s being the opposite of idolatrous?
Houck went on to complain that Hinchcliffe’s vulgar insults were accurately reported:
CBS Mornings and NBC’s Today were more passive and saved much of the criticism for Hinchcliffe.
“Trump the spectacle enthralled thousands of supporters. But the political impact remains unclear. Strategists tell us the words of others on stage, not Trump, could be amplified by Democrats in the coming days,” declared CBS chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa.
Co-host Nate Burleson said “comments that, quite frankly, rubbed people the wrong way” with Costa saying “jokes that veered into racist comments — they veered into really offensive remarks” and “speakers that not only just towed the line, they went over the line — crossed it and crossed it boldly.”
[…]NBC co-host Hoda Kotb described the rally and Trump’s speech as having been“overshadowed by racist remarks.” Trump campaign correspondent Garrett Haake repeated the o-word: “Trump’s message was over shadowed by some his supporters’ dark and sometimes racist rhetoric.”
Graham returned to try and whatabout his way out of the rally’s hateful tone:
The New York Times “news” team described Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally as a “Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism.” But what do you really think? There were a whole set of mudslinging headlines to cover the Sunday MAGA speeches in New York City.
CNN.com by Stephen Collinson: “Trump unveils the most extreme closing argument in modern presidential history”
POLITICO: “Trump’s New York homecoming sparks backlash over racist and vulgar remarks”
MSNBC.com by Steve Benen: “With racist Madison Square Garden rally, Trump and his allies prove Democrats’ point”
USA Today video: “Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden marked with racism and vitriol”
The first problem here is to presume Trump’s speeches are unique in “vitriol.” Reporters also use words like “insults and grievances,” as if Democrats never insult Trump or air grievances. They never sound vitriolic against Trump, with all the warnings of Fascism and the End of Democracy?
Jorge Bonilla tried to distance Trump from hateful words at his own rally in an Oct. 29 post:
With a week to go before the election, the Regime Media hold out hope against hope that they can get their hands on a good Trump-adverse story, hopefully one that might damage him in key swing states. The fallout from comic Tony Hinchcliffe’s controversial set at Madison Square Garden is the latest such instance.
[…]The hopium wafting throughout the media being that Hinchcliffe’s set might anger Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania to the point of holding the state and therefore clinching the election for Vice President Kamala Harris. Let this serve as your periodic reminder that the media truly do not care about Puerto Rico unless it is in service of the ongoing agenda.
So it is that Hinchcliffe’s set is pushed to the moon. Even though it was NOT delivered by Trump. None of that matters.
But Hinchcliffe was specifically invited to speak at Trump’s rally, which Bonilla wants you to believe doesn’t matter. He didn’t mysteriously appear there.
Clay Waters, meanwhile, went with 30-year-old whataboutism:
New York Times reporters Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman, and Michael Gold were on the scene for the purported Trump hate-fest held at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. The resulting story featured what political polling guru (and Kamala Harris supporter) Nate Silver in his newsletter called “the sort of headline” the paper’s “liberal critics” have “been pining for”: “A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism.”
[…]The media tends to be less sensitive when Republicans are not just joked about, but threatened “as a joke” at political events. A newsletter from the 1995 AFL-CIO union convention, which featured then-Vice President Al Gore as the main speaker, included this tasteless tidbit: “Drive home safely and remember: If you must drink and drive, try to do it when [Texas Republican Sen.] Phil Gramm is crossing the street.”
The New York Times ignored that truly hateful crack, as did the networks, and they certainly didn’t demand Gore distance himself.
But the MRC’s original item on the newsletter indicates it came from an AFL-CIO group in New Hampshire; the union’s convention that year was in New York City. Further, the convention appears to have run Oct. 23-25; according to the original MRC item, the newsletter in question came out on Oct. 29, well after the convention was over, meaning that Gore was long gone by the time it came out.
No reasonable person would try to directly blame Gore for that. Then again, Waters thinks Trump somehow bears no responsibility for an offensive speaker who spoke just before him, so nobody’s accusing him of being reasonable.