Between the pitch and the terror

On Sunday night at Madison Square Garden, the second-rate inheritors of a third-rate Klan dreamed of a Fourth Reich, imagining they would march into New York and declare a new boss. It was their attempt at cosplaying Hitler in Paris—though Trump is a criminal who has already been prosecuted by New York authorities.

Across the evening, the Trump campaign hit stride on hate, insulting Puerto Ricans, Latinos as a whole, Black Americans, women, Jews, and Palestinians. In the end, even the Trump team had to admit it was too much.

About the slur against Puerto Rico that wound up provoking the biggest backlash, spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

That night, I mentioned the Republicans were overreaching. Based on history I’d been thinking about, it seemed to me that they were trying to declare victory at a moment when they still needed to close the sale.

Just six months before he came to power, even Hitler had to pretend that the antisemitic threats he made didn’t apply to “honest Jews.” And The New York Times believed him, suggesting he wouldn’t do what he had been claiming he would. The Nazi Party was, the editorial suggested, “beyond doubt” becoming more moderate.

Until the election, Trump and his allies likewise need to keep pretending they’re only planning to punish criminals, even though they’re targeting pregnant women, immigrants, trans kids, and every ethnic or racial minority. But Sunday, the mask—nearly transparent to begin with—slipped.

Aspiring dictators have to perform delicate theater. When candidates or parties aim to do harm to a segment of the population over which they have or hope to gain control, it’s necessary to balance the pitch with the terror. They have to make the violence they want to unleash seem appealing and necessary while intimidating targets and opponents with threats.

Done correctly, this kind of propaganda produces a specific response in three categories of civilians. It generates malignant joy in core supporters, who seek restoration through violence. It projects a feeling of strength and safety to people in the middle, who tend to want to avoid unpleasantness for themselves. And it intimidates opponents, making resistance seem useless.

The balance between the carrot and the stick with that middle group can be hard to get right. On Sunday night, the speakers forgot to keep a veneer of reasonableness, of plausible deniability.

In my own research, I’ve seen examples of similar arrogance. Bad political actors convince themselves of the justice of their mission, and sometimes, they manage to fool news outlets into going along.

People are often surprised to find that the Nazis invited a New York Times journalist to visit Dachau in the first weeks after it opened as a concentration camp. The journalist involved seemed to sense that he wasn’t getting the whole story, noting that people were held without being criminally charged and that some prisoners had likely been arrested due to Nazi grudges. But he aimed to “both sides” the situation, noting that detainees seemed to be well fed and that “many of the prisoners looked as if the community would not suffer from their exclusion.”

Yet sometimes political actors misstep, losing sight of how bad the situation can appear to outsiders when they reveal their true colors. Reporting my concentration camp book in 2015, I wrote authorities in Myanmar, asking to visit detention camps holding Rohingya Muslims, a minority that had been expelled from integrated community life in the western state of Rakhine. The government in Yangon granted me a letter of permission, because after decades of fanning propaganda close to home, they imagined the terrorist threat of this minority ethnicity and the impossibility of reassimilating them would be obvious.

In the end, it was the local authorities who refused to let me in, realizing how bad everything looked on the ground in that moment. I had to find a way to sneak in. But the willingness of the higher-ups in the capital city—those distanced from the effects of the policies they were promoting—to show off what they were doing was very real. They let the mask slip.

A little over a year later, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya civilians were forced across the border into Bangladesh. Reports from humanitarian organizations described hundreds of villages razed and tens of thousands killed in what has been declared both ethnic cleansing and genocide.

In these examples of Nazi Germany and Myanmar, by the time journalists were permitted to see what authorities would normally keep hidden, political actors willing to harm targeted groups had already gained power, though further consolidation was still necessary. But Trump hasn’t returned to power yet. And he’s revealed far more of his plans than aspiring dictators should.

People at the core of the Trump team seem to have convinced themselves that they’ve already won, or that they’ll be able to declare victory in any case. They no longer feel a need to sell their program to anyone else.

It was hard to miss the happiness they felt at not having to pretend any longer. “The liberation he has brought to us,” Tucker Carlson said, “is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies.”

Earlier today, describing the Sunday rally, Trump said, “It was like a love fest—an absolute love fest… That was love in the room, and love for our country.”

They celebrated their perversion of politics as if it were normal. And with enough unchecked propaganda, the public will come to accept the Republican platform on display at Madison Square Garden as normal, too. Millions already have.

But it’s too soon for their Triumph of the Will pageantry. From Taraji Henson with Project 2025 to Bad Bunny more recently, public figures who are members of targeted groups have taken the lead on revealing the inherent dishonesty of the bill of goods that Trump and company are hawking. In the wake of Sunday’s debacle, the Archbishop of San Juan de Puerto Rico wrote a public letter demanding a direct disavowal of the racist comments.

Trump has not yet closed the sale. Last weekend at Madison Square Garden may mark the beginning of the end of his political future.

His allies overestimated his strength and revealed their true colors too completely, too soon. The race remains a dead heat. Americans still have time to step in between the pitch and the terror to make sure the worst a second Trump administration can unleash is stopped before it starts.