Trump at Madison Square Garden

Susan Glasser: “By now, you’ve most certainly heard about the most shocking comments from the rally at the Garden…”

“What was sickening about being there in person was watching the Trump fans around me and realizing that there was nothing shocking about it to them. The hate was the thing that they were there to cheer for; the nastier the nickname, the cruder the slur, the bigger the roar. The people around me were not threatening or particularly angry, but they were all in, it appeared, on the worst aspects of Trumpism—the cult of personality, the calculated hurling of vicious insults, the demonization of entire groups of people…”

“And yet, afterward, I found myself oddly optimistic for a few hours at least—perhaps it’s just too hard to believe that this dark, cramped, hateful vision of America is actually shared by a majority of Americans. I had a similar sense at the end of the GOP convention in Milwaukee, this summer: his Trumpified Republican Party feels too much like a religion that demands excessive suspension of disbelief from its followers.”