In the middle of the crowd, a few lost tourists with their suitcases take photos of the chaos. It’s a busy Sunday at New York’s famous Madison Square Gardens, but for an unusual event: a Donald Trump rally.
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“I’ve never seen such a queue,” said a passerby as thousands of noisy supporters of the Republican candidate for the White House gathered around the enclosure.
In the background of this gathering a few days before the American presidential election with its still uncertain outcome, essential figures of the New York urban landscape: the Empire State Building and the “naked cowboy” of Times Square, the one of the city’s tourist attractions.
But for the crowd, the real star is elsewhere. Seeing Donald Trump in the city of New York, deeply Democratic, is a real source of inspiration for Eric Milland, 65, who comes from Yonkers, a suburb north of the megalopolis.
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“It’s great to see him here,” says this retiree who leans on a cane. The man, who wears a Trump 2020 cap from which he crossed out the last 0 to update it with a 4, is counting on the former president to solve the country’s “big problems”: according to him, “immigration” and “overflowing hospitals”.
It was in New York that Donald Trump was born and made his fortune in real estate – several skyscrapers there bear his name – before being convicted several times by civil and criminal courts.
Insults
But the presence of a sea of supporters in red caps did not fail to cause some tension in the metropolis.
AFP
“I hope the terrorists kill you,” shouts a passerby to the seller of red caps and T-shirts bearing the image of the billionaire. A woman shouts insults at Donald Trump supporters in a scene captured by a television crew.
A little further on, an anti-Trump protester awaits Trump supporters with his banner reading: “Welcome to your Nazi rally.”
AFP
In the home stretch of a campaign where the former president’s speech became increasingly authoritarian, some noted that the choice of Madison Square Garden was not insignificant.
In 1939, the hall, which was further north in Manhattan, was the scene of an impressive far-right rally, in front of more than 20,000 sympathizers giving the Hitler salute amid American and Nazi flags.
This week, the Republican’s former chief of staff at the White House, John Kelly, estimated that his ex-boss met the definition of a fascist, an accusation echoed by Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
According to John Kelly, the ex-president also said that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had “done good things.”
And among the spectators, some families are more divided: like that of Laura, a Democratic sympathizer who did not wish to give her last name, arriving with her son who supports the Republican at the rally “so that we can talk about it and discuss it later.
“I don’t think all the people who vote for Trump are bad,” she explains, before adding: “Actually, people are a lot more normal than I thought.”
