The Bullshit Machine Is Running Out of Gas

New York City shrugs.

Your car.

The New York Knicks sell out Madison Square Garden for professional basketball games all the time. When you go you just let the usher scan your ticket and walk right in. The place is packed but there is not a line. This is how New York City runs things when they want to do a good job.

Yesterday, Donald Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden, and there was a line. It was not a small line. The line wrapped around the arena and stretched all the way down Seventh Avenue in front of the venue and then it continued all the way down the dark, canyon-like length of 33rd street to an entry point at Sixth Avenue. The line was hemmed in on the left and right by metal police barriers, and it was also closed off into a series of sections. Every 20 minutes or so the cops would open the gate of one section and the giddy crowd would begin to chant “USA! USA!” and they would all hold up their phones in the air to record the spectacle of themselves chanting “USA! USA!” Then they would surge forward about 200 feet until they hit the set of barriers enclosing them in the next section. You can say that the difference between a sold out event at Madison Square Garden with no line and an event at Madison Square Garden where the attendees are forced to stand in series of metal cattle pens for hours and hours without knowing if they will ever gain entry is due to the necessities of security precautions and so on. I do not believe this is true. The difference is down to whether you are in tune with the spirit of New York City. If you are, then every door shall open to you and you shall witness the beauty of the metropolis dropping its harsh mask and welcoming you as a member of its community of love. If not, keep standing in that line.

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The Trump crowd was antithetical to the spirit of New York City—a city of immigrants, a city of style, a city where you can discover the world. The people attending the rally were more like the city’s victims than its denizens. The only thing they were discovering was the Sbarro outside of Penn Station. They had come in from Long Island and upstate all of the other places that people live when they want to be in proximity to New York City while also despising the idea of dwelling in the city limits. For some, this was a national event. I stood in line on 33rd street next to a trio of college guys who had come from St. Louis. They had gone to see Central Park and now they were going to see Trump. Typical New York City weekend. I lasted an hour in the line, moving only half a block, before I tapped out. I don’t know if they ever got inside. If they did, they suffered.

With their pink cheeks and red MAGA visors and frat bro demeanor, those young men embodied a significant slice of the Trump fan base. The blocks around 34th street were dripping with the boy scouts of fascism, the unlucky youth who have never found a proper method of rebellion and have been left with this. These are the young men of golf courses, the ESPN College Gameday background sign-wavers, the ones who might sneak out from the church trip to sip a pint of smuggled vodka. America has failed them by never tugging their sleeves and showing them the cracks in the facade where culture hides. They in turn will fail America by growing into the next generation of blinkered adults who obsessively clean their cars and take out their road rage on the cashier at the Starbucks drive-through. They will daydream of war on their commutes and treasure those red hats in the same way that grownup hippies treasure their days of LSD. Ironically, living in a freezing, drafty railroad apartment for a while in the far reaches of Queens and subsisting on buttered rolls from the bodega might snap them out of their solidifying haze. It doesn’t seem likely to happen, though.

For now, all these visitors received was the freeze-dried version of Manhattan schlock that is automatically presented to all tourists lurking between Penn Station and midtown, like a cheap lei slung around the neck of bleary-eyed Hawaiian Airlines passengers. Some full-time vendors of souvenir Trump dreck had set up tables in the blocks around the arena, but they were matched by the normal vendors who had simply traded out their usual spangly pink “NYC” hats for MAGA hats. These vendors, many of whom are black men, are utterly agnostic, happy to sell anything to anyone, politics be damned. They are paragons of American capitalism, which will not save them if the NYPD ever gets unleashed, Giuiliani-style, to once again purge the city of its imagined terrors. Trump hats could be had for ten bucks. Sales appeared to be slow. I passed by a real live shell game crew, who had set up on the northeast corner of Herald Square, attracted by the prospect of thirty thousand marks who might not be aware of The Oldest Scam in the Book. It was charming in a retro way, as if a single peep show had decided to reopen in the space now occupied by the Times Square Olive Garden.

All in all, though, the city’s level of concern for all of this has become absolutely paltry. The vibes are weak. In the fraught days of 2020, a huge Trump rally in the middle of New York City would have drawn an army of antifa soldiers and Black Lives Matter protesters who would have screamed and scuffled in the streets. The NYPD would have deployed platoons of grim-faced riot cops with shields and helmets, stretching down the full length of streets, nervous that the city’s rage might spill over at any moment. Now, however, that all seems to have dissipated. There was a medium-sized counterprotest on the steps of Moynihan Train Hall, full of stern middle aged people waving “UNFIT” signs, and there was a DSA protest that was held, for some reason, in Bryant Park, ten blocks from where any of the Trump people might actually see it. But it all seemed pallid, rote, a recital of a set piece that has lost its real energy and is now coasting on pure muscle memory.

My friend Bucky, a quasi-journalist veteran of countless scenes of New York City chaos, kept gazing around forlornly as we wandered the streets around MSG. “Where’s all the antifa people?” he said. “I want to see somebody get jumped. What’s happening out here?” It was not violence he was after, really; it was just that the decline in action surrounding the Trump Industrial Complex was noticeable enough to depress him. Compared to Occupy and the 2020 protests and—hell, compared to the average SantaCon—this was a pretty dismal scene.

Inside of Madison Square Garden, they were telling familiar lies. Outside of Madison Square Garden, they couldn’t even sell the “ITALIANS FOR TRUMP” shirts they had lugged in and spread across a card table on 31st and 8th. This is a good sign. It takes a lot to cause a ripple in the mighty ocean of New York City. The World Series is happening in the Bronx this week and if you’re a half mile away, you would never even know it. The metropolis shrugs in the face of almost everything. Trump, the local clown who spent the past decade finding a larger stage for his act, seems to have finally burned through his hometown’s supply of attention. He doesn’t have the juice. The circus is trotting out the same acts every day, and they are losing their capacity to captivate. It feels like the bullshit machine has run out of gas and is now coasting on pure momentum. That can only go on a little while longer before it stops, and all the gaping crowds begin to wander off for the next spectacle.

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Also

• Related reporting from the front lines of Trump: Onward, Christian Soldiers—To War!; The MAGA Army Tries to Drag America to Hell; Risking Your Life for a Trump Rally Means There’s Nothing Left to Lose; Donald Trump Gay Marries Jesus: At the Family Leadership Summit. My god, I have been covering this guy for almost ten years. Please put me out of my misery. Please vote.

• This Sunday, November 3, at 11 a.m., I’ll be speaking about how the labor movement can save America at the New York Society For Ethical Culture, at 2 West 64th St. You can order my book about that topic here, and the full event listing and streaming info is here.

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