Alan Zendell, October 28, 2024

Anyone who imagines everything that happened at Madison Square Garden in New York, yesterday, wasn’t intentional is beyond naïve. Normally, I’d say, “feel free to bury your head in the sand,” but there’s too much at stake. Last week, Michelle Obama asked Americans if they were willing to engage in uncomfortable conversations to save America from another Trump presidency. I know you’re as tired of all this as I am. If you could press a button and enter suspended animation until the election is resolved, would you do it? I wish I could, but we can’t run from this fight.

We’re conditioned to believe that nothing Trump says can hurt him, because his base loves his antics. He does outrageous things they wish they could do, and he seems to get away with them.  They can only fantasize doing those things, so instead they created a cult hero. To everyone who feels left out or envious of anyone who has more than they do, Donald Trump is Robin Hood.

Except, he’s not. The Robin Hood of legend robbed from the rich to feed the poor. Trump thinks poor people are repulsive. He also thinks anyone not as rapacious as he is, is a loser and a sucker, especially the millions of Americans who’ve lost their lives defending our country. Speaking of which, Trump made a serious error last night.

My father fought in World War 2 and came home with a Purple Heart and a PTSD-blasted nervous system. I’d guess that more than half of all Americans living today are either directly descended from or related to someone who was either killed or maimed for life by the war. Maybe Trump was assuming that his base is so enthralled by him, nothing could change that. But if you had a father, uncle, or grandfather who fought the Fascists, you have to have felt at least a spark of reaction to the rally at the Garden.

It was designed to evoke images of the Nazi rally in the old Madison Square Garden in 1939, which was funded by German Nazis as Hitler was preparing the blitzkrieg over Poland. Is anyone so dense that they missed the parallel with Vladimir Putin intent on destroying Ukraine, whence he, too, can stare ominously across the border into Poland? I graduated from high school fifteen years after the war, so our American history classes were all about Neville Chamberlain and the rest of Europe learning that appeasement is the worst way to deal with a threatening bully.

Trump’s people are either too uninformed or too stupid to understand that letting Putin have Ukraine will have the same effect as ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler. Showing Hitler weakness only emboldened him, something most people my age understand, although younger people seem not to care. Our fathers and grandfathers would have been horrified by yesterday’s events.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Trump may have badly miscalculated this time. When Hurricane Maria smashed Puerto Rico in 2017, eight months into Trump’s presidency, and destroyed the island’s antiquated power grid, Trump couldn’t have cared less about the plight of 3.5 million people. Despite the fact that Puerto Ricans are Ameriacn citizens, Trump saw them as losers from a shithole country.

As a result of receiving almost no disaster aid from the Trump administration, a half million Puerto Ricans relocated to Florida, where they would be able to vote. Pundits predicted their fury at Trump trashing their homeland (Puerto Ricans are proud nationalists,) would cause them to turn Florida blue when he ran for re-election. But they didn’t, and as a result, Trump considers them weak and inconsequential. Why not trash them again if it charges up his racist base?

Stephen Miller and the other xenophobic racists Trump listens to screwed up this time. They didn’t count on pop culture stars, among whom are Puerto Rican idols Bad Bunny, Ricky Martin, and Jennifer Lopez, who have literally hundreds of millions of followers on Instagram and other platforms. They all released a tsunami of anger after yesterday at Madison Square Garden, and eight days before the remaining ballots are cast, there’s plenty of time to stoke up the righteous anger Trump deserves, but not enough time for Trump to distract them until they forget.

This time, they won’t be so distracted putting their homes back together that they can’t focus on who trashed them three years later. There are more than enough Puerto Rican Americans in the battleground states to turn the election into a landslide for Harris – if they are united and they care enough. The following chart makes this clear.

Puerto Rican Americans now join women, Blacks, and immigrants as having every reason to vote Trump into oblivion. Will they?