Keys to a 2024 Trump rally: Dark rhetoric, jokes and ‘the weave’

NEW YORK—“I’m thrilled to be back in the city I love,” Donald Trump declared, taking the stage at Madison Square Garden to address thousands of his supporters at the mother of all campaign rallies. And so it was: part rock show, part revival; at once dark and grievance-laden yet often comedic and epically long.

The rally officially marked the start of Trump’s closing argument against Kamala Harris. “I’d like to begin by asking a very simple question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Trump asked Sunday night to roars of “no,” as he vowed to pull off a rare White House comeback. Signs proclaimed, “Trump will fix it.”

But the six-hour spectacle, capped by roughly 75 minutes from Trump himself, also unofficially served as a capstone of sorts for the former Republican president who, win or lose next week, has likely run his last campaign. His freewheeling rallies, unlike anything seen in modern American politics, fueled his political rise just over eight years ago and have become a hallmark of his three White House bids. The costly events dazzle his biggest fans and offer his critics plenty of fodder for attacks, becoming almost just as polarizing as Trump himself.

At the close of the 2024 race, Trump brought the greatest show on earth—in his mind, at least—to the heart of New York City, the place where he built his fame, making enemies along the way. “Dream big again!” read video screens showing Trump outside the iconic arena, home of the Rangers, the Knicks and host of countless concerts.

“It’s a smackdown of all the people that tried to pull him down and all these people that are indicting him,” said Christina Lepano, a 50-year-old New York City public school teacher attending her first rally. “And now he comes to the Garden. It’s like the biggest New York F-you you could give.”

Inside some 20,000 people, a sea of red MAGA hats in the middle of deep-blue Manhattan, reveled in that attitude as a litany of speakers walked out to pounding music.

His inner circle, close family, loyalists in Congress and friends from the business world all paid homage to Trump, including Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s two eldest sons and his wife, Melania. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani got a standing ovation days after a judge ruled he must hand over his New York apartment, a signed Joe DiMaggio jersey and valuable watches to Georgia election workers he defamed as part of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

“He’s a New Yorker, that’s why some people get a little annoyed with him,” Giuliani said of Trump. “He speaks his mind.” Speakers took that cue. One waved a crucifix in his hand as he called Harris the Antichrist; another said she had “pimp handlers.”

Unconventional style

Trump has galvanized audiences with divisive rhetoric and comedic instinct. Like the professional wrestlers he learned from, Trump plays the baby face and the heel. Followers show up hours early and Trump further tests their loyalty with speeches that over the years grew longer and longer—and more outlandish.

You never know when you may hear him refer to opponents as “vermin,” suggest violence, praise Hannibal Lecter, or marvel at Arnold Palmer’s manhood. So rambling have the rallies become that Trump, always one to flip a liability on its head, came up with a phrase for it: “The Weave.”

After all the pumping excitement Sunday, Trump’s speech began fairly scripted. But the weave soon reared its head.

“Isn’t it nice to have somebody that’s your president that doesn’t need a teleprompter? We haven’t been on teleprompter for a long time,” Trump said. At one point a man in the audience yelled for Trump to “do the weave.”

“You have to do the weave, he says,” Trump responded, chuckling at the reference.

After another detour to discuss, among other things, how some vulnerable Democratic candidates were trying to show solidarity with him on some issues, Trump snapped back to the script: “Kamala Harris is a train wreck who has destroyed everything in her path.”

With early voting well under way across the country, the rally in his native New York—a reliably Democratic state—underscores his often unconventional approach to campaigning. The former president tends to opt for blowout events that trigger a media frenzy over personal interactions with voters in the key swing states that will decide this election. Trump, never one for kissing babies or making small talk with locals at rural diners, has instead favored delivering his message in the form of a show with personally-curated playlists, to large crowds of supporters who revere him.

“Everybody here’s a Trump lover, just loves this country and wants all the same things,” Lepano said.

The looseness Trump exhibited Sunday underscores his confidence of winning, as Harris’s momentum appeared to have stalled in recent days. She has hosted monster, energetic rallies of her own, including one Friday with Beyoncé. But like the candidate, they are much more disciplined affairs than Trump’s. Much of public polling shows a deadlocked race, but many Democrats have grown more anxious about Harris’s chances.

Trump shows his happiness with the state of the race with goofball dance moves during “YMCA,” the song that ends his rallies. Last week he added a new bit to the routine, reaching for an imaginary golf club and taking a swing.

Darker rhetoric

Trump held his first rally in June 2015, drawing a couple hundred people to a community college in Manchester, N.H. Instead of “God Bless the USA,” the Lee Greenwood tune that the singer belted as Trump hit the stage in New York, his walk-on song then was “Takin’ Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. In New Hampshire, Trump launched into a speech ripping illegal immigration while pitching himself as an outsider who didn’t need to suck up to donors. Within two months, the rally crowds boomed birthing chats of “build the wall” and “lock her up,” the latter a reference to Hillary Clinton, his first Democratic rival.

Over the years, the rallies became longer and more wild, and by this election Trump had many more grievances to nurse: the 2020 election results he falsely claimed Democrats rigged, the indictments (and conviction in New York) he bashed as witch hunts, the social-media companies he said had blacklisted him—not to mention two impeachments while president. Though he has always been rougher around the edges, Trump’s rhetoric at his rallies grew more brazen and shocking. He took the stage at a Texas rally in March 2023 as footage of his supporters—“patriots” he called them—storming the U.S. Capitol was shown on huge video screens. He had repeatedly threatened to lock up political opponents.

The rallies, more than anything else, have been Trump’s forum to paint a bleak picture of the country he says only he can turn around. He denigrates illegal immigrants, calls his rivals losers, suckers, fools. He speaks of “the enemy from within” that he casts as “the fascists, the Marxists, the communists running the country.”

Last week, Clinton told CNN that Trump was “re-enacting” a Madison Square Garden rally in 1939 at which “neo-Nazis, fascists, in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany.”

At one point Sunday, Hulk Hogan came out in full wrestling costume, pumping his ripped arms. “I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here,” he said.

Comedian and podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe, who hosts a podcast called “Kill Tony,” received swift backlash from Democrats and some Republicans over his raunchy comments and offensive jokes about Latinos, Black Americans, Arabs and Jews. He referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating pile of garbage,” and mocked a Black man whom he said “carved watermelons” for Halloween.

Democrats particularly seized on sexually-laden comments he made about Latinos, with a Harris campaign account on X calling it a “vile racist tirade.” Later, he said: “These people have no sense of humor…I made fun of everyone.”

Jokes and spectacles

Taking aim at the news media is a staple of Trump rallies, but he also loves the attention. From the beginning, CNN and other networks repeatedly played his rallies largely uninterrupted, effectively giving Trump free advertising.

“That’s a lot of fake news,” he said motioning to the hundreds of journalists in the back of the arena. “Look at that. That’s got to be a record,” he said Sunday, as the crowd laughed. Comments such as this are a way of letting audiences in on running jokes about—and by—the former president.

“I don’t like my hair tonight,” Trump said to laughter Wednesday in Georgia after catching himself on the jumbo screen. He then showed the immigration chart that was displayed during the rally in Butler, Pa., this summer when he was nearly assassinated. Trump would have likely been killed had he not turned his head to look at the chart.

“I sleep with this chart,“ he said in Georgia. “I take it to bed every night and kiss it, roll it up and just kiss it.” Friday night in Michigan, Trump called on women to get their significant other to the polls. “Tell him to get the hell off the couch, Henry. You big slob, get off the couch, we’re gonna vote for the president, we’re going to make America great again.”

For many Americans, especially liberals, Trump being within striking distance of returning to the White House is no laughing matter.

Margie Blanton was outside Moynihan Train Hall en route to Boston when she saw the huge line outside the Garden. “It’s scary to see how much support he has,” said Blanton, who supports Harris and is from Jersey City, N.J. “I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves and think he doesn’t have a chance because of what happened in 2016. I don’t know, seeing things like this is scary.”

Write to Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com and Vivian Salama at vivian.salama@wsj.com