In 1939, Fritz Kuhn railed against President “Rosenfelt” and Governor Thomas “Jewey” to thunderous applause. In 2024, there was a podcast comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe who told the audience, to peals of laughter, that there was an island made of trash floating in the ocean and it was called “Puerto Rico,” and immediately gained notoriety, which is the highest form of street belief in the MAGA movement. In 1939, at the end of Kuhn's speech, twenty thousand people chanted, “Free America!” In 2024, nineteen thousand people cheered as the soulless shell that was Tucker Carlson told them that Kamala Harris was “the first Samoan-Malaysian.” “the most “low-IQ” former California prosecutor ever elected president.”

I am not minimizing the danger associated with next Tuesday's election. I lived through a Trump administration*. I would prefer not to have to experience the live-action adventure Trump unleashed. But gentleman above, these people are not only ruthless, they are comical lightweights, right down to their dear leader. They are burlesque authoritarians. The 1939 rally was a Wagner opera in a world on the brink of war. This was a terrific version of a drive-by radio talk show, with Joe on the car phone worrying about his son coming home from third grade as his daughter. In 1939, the Garden was full of Americans pledging their allegiance to a leader on the other side of the world who was already setting up his concentration camps. This was a gathering of Americans afraid of scarecrows. In the play by Robert Bolt A man for all seasonsThomas More is questioned by Thomas Cromwell about some false accusations and More tells Cromwell that the accusations are “horrors to children, Mr. Minister. Not for me.” And then he leaves, having won the argument. Of course, they cut off his head at the end of the play.

I have made a mistake. I decided not to apply for press accreditation and give the former president* another chance to call me an enemy of the people. I registered for general admission. I wanted to be one of them. Of course, this led to me being inundated with emails and text messages asking me for money and offering me a gold MAGA hat for my trouble. But I thought that would be a small price to pay for the chance to join the gang, at least for a day. So, as instructed, I reported at noon on Sunday to join the line known as Thirty-Third Street.

In three hours we covered about four blocks. I've had entertaining conversations with a few people. I spent five or ten minutes discussing Ray Epps with a tall man standing next to me. (Ray Epps is the Arizona gardener who believers believe was the FBI agent provocateur who sparked the violence on January 6, 2021. Epps was convicted of disorderly conduct and received a year's probation for his troubles, but this People didn't let anything go.) We were all briefly entertained by a Kim Jong-un lookalike – hey, it's a living – working on the sidewalk in front of a clothing store. I chatted longer with Thomas and Peter, two Dubliners who were staying with Peter's uncle in New Jersey and who flew over just to be part of the fun.

There are a number of Irish bars along Thirty-Third Street: Celtic Rail, Stout and Feile. The Celtic Rail is located where McAnn's used to be, a classic Manhattan watering hole. In 1976, a group of us who had worked for Congressman Mo Udall's presidential campaign traveled to New York for the Democratic National Convention. We couldn't get in, of course, so we drove to McAnn's to watch Mo's speech in support of candidate Jimmy Carter.

“Out on Boot Hill in Tombstone,” Mo began, “there's a gravestone that says, 'JOHNSON – DID HIS FUCKING THING.'” I think that was the story of the Udall campaign. Whether young or old, we gave it our all. We hit hard, but we hit fairly. We talked about problems and the difficult decisions we face. And we had some close calls and some overtime and our money got cut off. We had more obituaries than Lazarus… but the big blue ribbon never came. We tried to be kind and generous and weren’t afraid to laugh at ourselves.”

Of all my political memories, this was my favorite. As I stood in the motionless crowd outside the former McAnn's on Sunday, I watched as people slowly left the line and streamed into the Celtic Rail because the other two bars, Stout and Feile, had adopted a policy of keeping customers out, who wear campaign clothing of any kind. (Esquire was unable to reach management at either bar to confirm this policy.) Feile was packed with people watching Sunday's Formula One race. (How does a place become a Formula 1 bar? It's a mystery.) Brian, who was working the door, explained the no-go policy. “It's based on the old adage 'Never talk about politics or religion at the bar.'” “Given the fact that my colleagues on the line wore Trump shoes, Trump flags and a suit jacket decorated with colorful images of the former president * was decorated, not to mention dozens of variations of the MAGA hat, this was a sensible policy. I watched as Brian politely bounced these people.

The Celtic Rail was the only stop in the area that did not appear to be adhering to the no-travel policy, and it quickly filled up with people who had given up on the route. A steady stream of them came down the sidewalk away from the garden. Finally, at about 3:30 p.m., police got past the line and told people that the garden was full and no one else was allowed in. The snake melted like snow in April. Before the former president* even spoke, police removed the barriers and the largest crowd in the area gathered outside Macy's on Thirty-Fourth Street, decked out for Christmas.

The former president's speech* was hate radio on the air. He would stick to the teleprompter he otherwise didn't use and then embark on familiar flights of fancy. It was a lie that was left to the evil, endless cliché and is ingrained in our politics for the foreseeable future. In fact, it was not the banality of evil, but the evil of banality. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

What threw me off, however, was the exchange between the former president* and Speaker Moses about their “little secret.” That was new. That was amazing. This was a moment of real danger. It got some laughs from the audience, but it was a bigger threat than anything Fritz Kuhn threw at his salivating crowd. For all their imperial stupidity, the Nazis of 1939 did not pose the threat to the mechanisms of democracy that that little passage in the former president's speech* did. The wink and allusion to the ultimate ratf*cking was scarier than all the “Sieg Heils” that herded Isadore Greenbaum onto the stage, Nazi thugs be damned. Fritz Kuhn had all the stage decoration, but the former president*, surrounded by ridiculous grotesques of dictatorship, has already written the script and everyone knows his role.