Donald Trump, perhaps gunning for a Nixonian repeat, plans to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden just nine days before Election Day.
It worked for Richard Nixon in 1968. A week after he held his Halloween rally at the famed venue he won the presidential election.
Trump’s planned rally at the Garden on Oct. 27 has critics drawing parallels to the most infamous political event held there: the pro-Nazi rally of 1939, when Hitler sympathizers railed against “job taking Jewish immigrants.”
At his own campaign rallies, Trump has decried migrants who he says are “destroying the blood of our country” and “taking your jobs.”
The venue, home to the New York Knicks, where both Republicans and Democrats have held their national political conventions in the past, can seat nearly 20,000 people. It’s a fitting place for a man obsessed with crowd sizes, especially when his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, outshines him.
Trump hinted he would wade into the deep blue New York City where he is overwhelmingly unpopular during an interview on Fox News earlier this year.
“New York has changed a lot in the last two years,” he told Fox News, adding, “People that would have never voted for me because I’m a Republican… I think they’re going to vote for me. So I think we’re going to give New York a heavy shot.”
But what’s heavier are the odds against Trump coming anywhere close to winning New York’s 28 electoral votes. He lost the Empire State by nearly two million votes in 2020, an even wider margin than his 2016 loss to the state’s former senator, Hillary Clinton. The Cook Political Report rates New York as one of the safest Democratic states in the country.
New York isn’t the only place where Trump is making a longshot campaign stop. The former president is set to rally in Coachella this weekend in triple-digit temperatures; no Republican presidential candidate has won California in almost three decades.
But there are other reasons for Trump to visit the California desert. The area is rife with rich Republican donors—and besides the practical benefits of their support, rubbing shoulders with the wealthy and powerful is one of the former president’s favorite pastimes.
