Dante’s Inferno at Madison Square Garden

Today, we had Donald Trump’s great big pre-election rally in Madison Square Garden.

I don’t know if I’m surprised at how it went or not.

If you do a quick search, you’ll find the media is being pretty honest about how bigoted and racist the Madison Square Garden rally was, and I’m glad they’re largely owning that. The New York Daily News headline reads “Trump’s MSG Event Turns into Ugly Racist Rally, Insults Puerto Ricans, Blacks, Jews.” But that’s not really fair. It neglects to mention that they also insulted just about everybody else in the country.

The event insulted all Latin people when Tony Hinchcliffe, an alleged comedian, the same person who said Puerto Rico was a floating island of garbage, made a crass sexual joke about all Latino people and their ejaculations. I don’t see why I should censor that for you, since the Party of Family Values didn’t. He also insulted Black people by making a joke about watermelons. A painter called Scott Lobaido insulted “the art world” in general by flipping the finger at them on live television. A radio host named Sid Rosenberg insulted immigrants as “F*cking illegals” and called Hillary Clinton “a sick son of a b*tch.” Grant Cardone insulted Mark Cuban by calling him a “simp” and then said he wanted to “slaughter” all Democrats.

Then Rudy Giuliani took the stage in an inebriated state. He insulted Palestinians, implying that every one of them is a terrorist; later, Rudy insulted the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, by drunkenly referring to their town as “New Paleston.” Alina Habba insulted our eyes by prancing around in a red jumpsuit. Some man wearing a baseball cap who talked like Jerry Lewis waved a crucifix around and screamed that Kamala Harris was the Antichrist. Stephen Miller, who is one year younger than me but looks seventy, appeared and insulted every single immigrant and indeed all Americans whose ancestors came here from somewhere else, by screaming that “AMERICA IS FOR AMERICANS AND AMERICANS ONLY.” Maybe some Indigenous person would like to pack his bags and buy him a ticket. And then Byron Donalds came out and insulted transgender people.

At that point I had to leave for Sunday Mass. I expected that I’d miss the Trump speech by the time I got back, and I wasn’t too sorry about that.

But when I got back, I found that I’d only missed Mike Johnson insisting that the Republicans were the “party of Law and Order,” followed by Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy, and then Tucker Carlson who called Kamala Harris “Samoan-Malaysian,” when she is in fact of Jamaican and Indian heritage. I was surprised at this. I was told Trump was going to take the stage promptly at five.

Next came a surprise appearance by Hulk Hogan, wearing a tiny pair of sunglasses. I remember playing with my cousins’ Hulk Hogan action figure in the late eighties, but I thought he was already a tired has-been in the nineties.

As I cooked and ate my dinner, I saw Doctor Phil making a speech, but I honestly wasn’t paying attention at that point.

When I got back to the computer, it was time for J. D. Vance, Eric Trump, Lara Trump, and Donald Trump Junior. Still no Donald Senior who was supposed to give his speech at five. Then we had someone called Howard Lutnik who said we had to “crush Jihad,” insulting all the Muslims in America. Then we had an extremely awkward appearance by Elon Musk, and a demure speech by Melania Trump of all people– Elon was in a shirt two sizes too small and Melania was in a dress whose pattern was inspired by a fingerprint. She is the one who finally introduced her husband, the presidential candidate, two hours and twelve minutes late. He pecked her on the cheek, and she mouthed something that looked like “that’s enough, thank you.”

Finally, it was time for Trump’s speech.

The speech was very boring. Trump looked haggard, pale and tired. He mostly stuck to the teleprompter, reading his usual lines about savage immigrants coming from the Congo and other countries, to cut pretty white girls to pieces. He’s graduated from wanting a wall on the Mexican border to wanting to cover the country in “a big beautiful dome.” It was nothing we hadn’t heard before.

Trump’s worshippers disappeared out into the night, many of them before he’d finished speaking.

He was meant to be the climax of the whole circus, but he was an anticlimax– almost beside the point.

I felt as if I’d descended into the bowels of Dante’s inferno and found, at the center of that frozen lake, that the devil himself was the most boring, mundane and banal fiend of them all.

Maybe there’s a moral in that.

Maybe that’s what evil really is. It wraps itself in the trappings of excitement, but when you strip off the hood and look at it, it’s a sleepy old man with no talent who hates everyone.

I’ve been fighting this nonsense for nine years now.

When I first started writing, I thought I’d be writing poetry and meditations on Catholic devotions, but somehow, I’ve been trying to tell people that a fascist movement that hates immigrants ought not to be a Christian movement since 2016.

In 2016, I remember some Catholic blogger friends of mine who were opposed to Trump got fired from a newspaper for using too much vulgarity on social media, but now the acolytes of Trump flip the middle finger and curse about washed up politicians on live television, and nobody seems to mind. We’ve all moved beyond that somehow.

I just don’t want to think about this man anymore.

I hope the day is coming soon when we never, ever, ever have to think about him again. But on that day, we’ll still have the movement he championed to deal with.

Maybe we always will.