When MAGA Came to Manhattan

A supporter at Sunday’s New York rally for Trump.Katie Godowski/MediaPunch/AP

On Sunday, the MAGA crowd arrived in midtown Manhattan.

Their destination? Madison Square Garden, where Trump is holding a Sunday night rally featuring an army of his most loyal acolytes—including his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio); X owner Elon Musk, who has been pulling out all the stops to help reelect Trump; ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson; Moms for Liberty founder Tiffany Justice; and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, among others.

When I arrived outside the arena just before 11 a.m.—six hours before Trump was to take the stage inside, and an hour before doors opened—the line of MAGA hat-wearing supporters wrapped around the block.

The choice of New York as the location for a massive Trump rally, just over a week from Election Day, is confounding: In 2020, President Joe Biden won 87 percent of votes cast in Manhattan. And just a few miles south of the midtown block where the crowd gathered Sunday are the courthouses where, earlier this year, Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts in his hush-money case and ordered to pay $355 million in a civil fraud case brought by state Attorney General Letitia James. Add to that that New York has not voted to elect a Republican president since 1984, when Ronald Reagan, the incumbent, beat Walter Mondale.

But the ex-president—who was born and raised in Queens—has never been deterred by facts. “We are going to win New York,” he has said on the campaign trail. His supporters who showed up Sunday were similarly defiant. “I’m voting for the felon,” yelled one man standing near the line, “and I can’t wait.”

That man, who gave his name as George D. and said he lives on Long Island and works in Manhattan, was holding a flag with Trump’s mugshot emblazoned over the Stars and Stripes. He was one of several supporters who told me he thinks Trump will win the election, despite his apparent tie with Vice President Kamala Harris in the polls. (A new ABC News/Ipsos poll out Sunday shows Harris restoring a lead, polling at 51 percent to Trump’s 47 percent.)

“Neck and neck means Trump’s ahead,” George said. “I wear this MAGA hat every day, and I feel the pulse in the streets,” he added. “I went from getting middle fingers to getting thumbs up.”

Like several supporters I spoke to, George preferred Trumpian talking points to my fact-checks, and characterized his candidate as unfairly persecuted by the left. The “lamestream media,” he claimed, is “building a lie” about Trump’s chances of winning. “The only way to beat him is to lock him up or try to assassinate him,” he said, adding that he thinks the attempted assassinations of Trump were “an inside job.” (Trump, Vance, and Trump’s sons have also falsely claimed, without evidence, that Democrats were behind the assassination attempts; threat assessment experts have told my colleague Mark Follman that this could fuel more retaliatory violence.)

The shootings were on his fans’ minds. When I asked a woman in line named Dana about Trump’s shot at winning, a man behind her cut in: “Don’t say ‘shot’!” The group laughed. Dana turned back to respond to my question about whether Trump could win: “100 percent,” she said, unblinking.

She knew, though, that she was something of an oddity in an election that has arguably become as much about gender as about policy: The most recent ABC/Ipsos poll shows Harris with a 14-point advantage among women voters, while Trump has a 6-point advantage among men. Dana, who is from New Jersey, was wearing a pink “Women for Trump” hat. She pointed to it: “I can’t wear this hat when I drop my kids off at school.”

Dana believes women are flocking to Harris due to reproductive rights (fact check: true), but she doesn’t believe Trump actually decimated those rights—he left them to the states. And she doesn’t think he’ll sign a national abortion ban, despite the fact that Trump twice refused to commit to not doing so during the debate (earlier this month, he said in a social media post he would veto it if Congress passed it). “I vote on policy,” Dana said, adding that she was voting for Trump due to his stances on immigration, the economy, and inflation. Under Biden, someone nearby claimed, bacon now costs $12. “I want to eat more bacon!” Dana exclaimed.

A bit behind Dana and her friends, I met a Dutch woman named Gabriëlle Kok who showed up not because she supports Trump, but because she wanted to see who does. The only thing she seemed to have in common with Dana was believing Trump has a shot at reelection. “I think he’s a very dangerous man—for everybody, but especially for women,” Kok said. The Netherlands recently installed its first far-right government, whose leader, Geert Wilders, is known as the ‘Dutch Donald Trump.’ “I think they look up at Trump and Trumpism,” Kok said of the Netherlands’ new government. “There’s inspiration to be gotten for them.”

But Luis Rodriguez, who I met towards the end of the line, feels differently: He sees Trump as a bulwark against the socialism of Cuba, which he emigrated from in 1961, just after Fidel Castro came to power, he said. “I’m much more aware of how fragile democracy is,” Rodriguez, who lives in Manhattan, told me, adding that he’s a registered independent who voted for Obama in 2008.

He had just voted early, before showing up to the rally, he added. “I always get emotional when I vote,” Rodriguez said. “It’s like going to church.” (Trump and his acolytes, of course, still refuse to admit he lost the 2020 election, and are preemptively sowing doubt about this year’s race.)

Rodriguez thinks 2020 was a “troubled election,” he said, and finds the comparisons of Trump to Hitler and other fascists absurd. “Hitler is the cheapest trope you can throw out at someone to shut them up,” he said, adding that the Democrats’ messaging has “become ‘abortion’ and ‘Trump is Hitler.’” He was exasperated. “I’m a Hispanic, immigrant, and I’m gay. I get told I’m supporting a racist, a xenophobe, and an anti-gay bigot.”

His friend Gary Mirkin, of Long Island, was wearing an “I’m Voting For the Felon” t-shirt. He chimed in: “I’m conservative and Jewish, and people tell me I’m voting for Hitler.” Just then, someone in a MAGA cap walked by with a bullhorn, chanting, “F Joe Biden” and “Let’s Go Brandon!”

But these were the theatrics Rodriguez appeared tired of. “Can we discuss the policy?” he asked. Like Dana, Rodriguez said he was voting for Trump based on issues around immigration and the economy. (The ABC/Ipsos poll shows Trump leading Harris on both of those issues, by 12 points and 8 points, respectively.)

More than once during our conversation, Rodriguez claimed that the Biden administration had lost 300,000 migrant children—a Trump-endorsed talking point that experts say is misleading, and refers to unaccompanied migrant children who did not get notices to appear in court, not children who are lost, trafficked or dead. What did Rodriguez make of the separations of immigrant families under Trump, I asked, given that the Trump campaign has not ruled out doing it again? Rodriguez said something that Vance has: Children are separated every day in the US when their parents are arrested.

He also added that the Obama administration built cages to detain immigrant children—which is true, though it did not maintain a policy of systemically separating families, as the Trump administration did. That policy has, as of earlier this year, still left more than 1,300 kids separated from their parents, according to a Department of Homeland Security report.

Regardless, Rodriguez trusts Trump: “I think he’s the only one that has the grit and wherewithal” to confront the “corrupt establishment,” he said. So what happens if Harris wins? “Obama will pull her strings,” Mirkin said, adding that he had signed up to be a poll watcher. (The GOP has recruited 200,000 poll watchers to “establish the battlefield” to challenge the results of the election, should Trump lose.)

But he and Rodriguez weren’t too worried. “Tied,” Mirkin said, “means he’s winning.”