|
![]() ![]() ![]() |
Copyright © 2025 MEDIADC, All rights reserved.Washington Examiner | A MediaDC Publication 1152 15th Street NW Suite 200 | Washington, DC 20005 |
|
![]() ![]() ![]() |
Copyright © 2025 MEDIADC, All rights reserved.Washington Examiner | A MediaDC Publication 1152 15th Street NW Suite 200 | Washington, DC 20005 |
We invite you to a discussion and Q & A with America’s Mayor, Rudy Giuliani.
Remember to renew your 2025 membership if you haven’t already. Thank you.
Tickets include: 1 Beverage ticket, Passed Hor d’oeuvres, discussion,valet.
JANUARY 9, 2025
JOE BIDEN’S ENDURING DECEPTIONS.
As far as the press are concerned, Joe Biden has been the least accessible president in memory. There’s a reason for that. It’s been clear for a long time that the 82-year-old Biden is not mentally and physically up to the job. After it became politically safe for Democratic-supporting media outlets to report his infirmities — that was after his disastrous June 27, 2024, debate performance against President-elect Donald Trump — we learned that Biden’s staff went to great lengths to keep him away from the press. For whatever reason, many reporters happily steered clear of questioning the president’s condition.
An outgoing president often conducts final interviews with media outlets. Biden chose to do just one, with USA Today’s Susan Page. And three embarrassing blunders — or were they deceptions, or self-deceptions? — show why Biden’s aides have kept him away from interviews for so long.
First was Biden’s insistence that inflation was raging at 9% when he took office, when, in fact, inflation was a quite low 1.4% in January 2021. Biden first made the claim last May, when he was still in the campaign against Trump, telling CNN, “No president has had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office. Nine percent.” Even though a bunch of media fact-checkers pointed out the error, Biden repeated it a week later.
Now, in the USA Today interview, Biden has done it again, although in somewhat garbled form. He was asked whether “you think you paid too little attention early on to the warning about inflation with the American Rescue Plan,” the giant $1.9 trillion stimulus he signed into law on March 11, 2021, “or failed to recognize soon enough how much this was affecting so many Americans’ lives?”
“I knew how much inflation was affecting their lives, but none of this had passed when inflation was at 9%,” Biden answered. It is totally unclear what he meant by that. Inflation, low when he took office, did not hit its peak, 9.1%, until July 2022, when Biden had been in office a year and a half. Biden then went on to brag that his policies did not result in a recession, as many had predicted. “The fact is that we had a soft landing, no recession, and the interest rate was 9% when we came into office in the beginning. It was down to 2.34% now.”
In the context of his entire statement, it appears that by “interest rate,” Biden meant “inflation rate.” So he seems to have again claimed that it was 9% when he took office. Perhaps Biden actually believes this, which could suggest that he does not have a firm grasp of what took place with inflation during his presidency.
The second blunder concerned Biden’s son, Hunter, who has pleaded guilty to tax charges, among other things. In the USA Today interview, Biden defended his decision to pardon his son, even after promising earlier that he would never do such a thing. Biden told Page that he changed his mind about pardoning Hunter because “I found out two factors. No. 1, that he had paid all his taxes. He paid them late. … He paid all his taxes. He paid the back taxes. He was late.”
The problem with that is that Hunter Biden did not pay his back taxes — a wealthy Hollywood lawyer and Joe Biden supporter paid his back taxes. Kevin Morris, sometimes referred to as Hunter Biden’s “sugar brother,” has acknowledged loaning him $6.5 million, millions of which went to paying his back taxes and penalties. As of the most recent reports, Hunter Biden has not repaid Morris.
The third blunder was Biden’s belief that he would have won reelection had he remained on the presidential ballot last year. “Do you believe you could have won in November?” Page asked. “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes, based on the polling,” Biden answered.
Election observers of all stripes immediately flipped out. “I categorize Biden’s statement that he could have beaten Trump as flat-out bonkers,” CNN’s Harry Enten posted. “Biden was well behind Trump when he dropped out. Biden never led in all of 2024. And no incumbent president who was anywhere near as unpopular as Biden has ever won.”
It’s hard to argue with that. And it is safe to say that there was no chance in the world that Biden would defeat Trump had he stayed in the race. But the president can believe what he wants to believe, and at this point, there appears to be no convincing him otherwise.
Our Annual Meeting this year includes an election of new officers for a two year term. The slate to be presented has been approved by the current Board of Directors at the December monthly Board meeting. The slate is as follows:
President: Amanda Schumacher
1st VP: John Gordon
2nd VP: David Burck
Treasurer: Oliver R. Grace, Jr.
Ass’t. Treasurer: Thomas A.Pence, Jr.
Corresponding Secretary: Martha Quay
We Are pleased to announce the Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton and the Idaho Attorney General, Raul Labrador will be our lead speakers for a dynamic , informative meeting.
Current Club members will confirm this slate at the meeting, starting at 6:30pm. Please be sure you are current in your 2025 dues so you may participate in the vote.Our dues are annual. We are a Not-For-Profit organization. We are tax exempt.
Please save the dates:
Thursday, January 23, Annual Meeting
Tuesday, February 18 TBD Conflict with AmericaFest
Tuesday, March 18 Senator Rick Scott
Tuesday, April 15 Economic Forum
Tuesday, May 13
Byron York’s Daily Memo: Now we know how many secret sources the FBI had on Jan. 6, but what did they do?
December 13, 2024
NOW WE KNOW HOW MANY SECRET SOURCES THE FBI HAD ON JAN. 6, BUT WHAT DID THEY DO? It took years, but now we know the number of secret informants the FBI had in Washington during the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. What we don’t know is what they did.
In a long-awaited report, Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the Justice Department, revealed that 26 confidential human sources, or CHSs, “were in Washington, D.C., on January 6 in connection with the events of January 6.” Of that number, 17 went into the Capitol or into the restricted area around the Capitol. Of them, four went inside the Capitol, while 13 were on the restricted grounds. Beyond that number, there were nine CHSs who did not enter the Capitol or the restricted area. We don’t know where they were.
The FBI told Horowitz that most of the CHSs came to Washington on their own and not at the orders of or request of the FBI. But several of them, 13 in all, informed their FBI handlers that they were traveling to Washington. And three of the CHSs had, in fact, been assigned by FBI field offices to go to Washington. Of that group, one entered the Capitol, while the other two entered the restricted area. The report says that none of them were authorized by the FBI to enter those areas. Of the 23 other CHSs who were not assigned to go to Washington and instead came on their own initiative, three entered the Capitol, and 11 entered the restricted area.
None of the CHSs, including the total of four who went inside the Capitol and the 13 who entered the restricted area, has been prosecuted, the inspector general said.
The report goes through some of the CHSs’ interactions with various FBI field offices around the country. (The FBI has 55 field offices nationwide.) None of the CHSs were identified in the report, but some clearly had close connections inside two groups, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, that have been extensively prosecuted for their activities in the Capitol riot. Many of those CHSs did not travel to Washington for Jan. 6 but instead told their FBI handlers what they knew of the groups’ leaders’ plans. Other CHSs had access to online chats and communications in what the FBI calls “the RMVE and AGAAVE movements.” (RMVE refers to Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism, and AGAAVE refers to Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremism.)
It should be noted that confidential human sources are not employees of the FBI. As for actual FBI agents, the report said, “The FBI did not have any undercover employees at the Ellipse, on the National Mall, or at the Capitol on January 6.”
On many occasions, the report states that this or that CHS, whether in Washington on FBI directions or not, “was not authorized to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on January 6, 2021.” There is a tone of defensive repetition throughout the report: The FBI wants you to know, over and over and over, that it didn’t authorize anyone to do anything bad.
What they don’t say is what the FBI confidential sources actually did, authorized or not. On a few occasions, the report gives the reader a bare-bones sketch of a confidential source’s activities but not enough information to draw any conclusions. For example, a source referred to as “Field Office 4 CHS” merits an entire subsection of the report. He is described as “well placed” and “with excellent access” in the RMVE and AGAAVE world. The source was apparently close to someone who was close to Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys. The source told the FBI field office that he was traveling to Washington for Jan. 6 — on his own, not at the FBI’s request.
The report says the Field Office 4 CHS “was not authorized to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was the CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6.” So what did Field Office 4 CHS do? That is a little less clear.
After the rioting started, the CHS tried to contact his FBI handler four times, according to the report, which does not say whether any of those attempts were successful. And then, from the report: “Evidence we reviewed showed that Field Office 4 CHS entered the Capitol. The inspector general reviewed records indicating that, after January 6, Field Office 4 provided information from this CHS, including cellphone video from the Capitol, to the Washington Field Office. After reviewing this information, the Washington Field Office asked Field Office 4 to task the CHS with returning to DC for the inauguration. The inspector general reviewed additional records indicating that the CHS was reimbursed for the CHS’s travel on January 6 and for the inauguration, even though the CHS was only tasked with attending the inauguration and not the electoral certification on January 6.”
So, whatever Field Office 4 CHS did, the FBI was really happy with it. The bureau asked that the CHS return to Washington for the Jan. 20 inauguration and paid for both his trips, Jan. 6 and Jan. 20. The source apparently gave the FBI some cellphone video, but beyond that, we don’t know what Field Office 4 CHS did inside or outside the Capitol.
That was the most detailed account of any CHS’s activities in the report. The FBI was careful to say it never authorized Field Office 4 CHS to do anything illegal, but it never says whether the CHS actually did anything illegal. And that is the problem with the new report. Beyond the numbers — 26 CHSs in Washington for the events of Jan. 6, 17 of whom entered the Capitol or the restricted area — there’s just not much there.
We do know that none of them were prosecuted, but we don’t know what that means. The report quoted the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, which makes prosecution decisions, saying that it “generally has not charged those individuals whose only crime on January 6, 2021 was to enter the restricted grounds surrounding the Capitol, which has resulted in the office declining to charge hundreds of individuals; and we have treated the CHSs consistent with that approach.” OK, so what about the four who entered the Capitol? We don’t know.
I asked William Shipley, a former federal prosecutor who has defended more than 50 Jan. 6 defendants and who posts on X under the name @Shipwreckedcrew. “It is correct in my experience that the DOJ is not charging people who were inside the restricted area but remained outside the Capitol,” he responded via email. “There were tens of thousands of people in the crowd but only 1,500 have been charged. With a handful of exceptions, those who have been charged either went inside, or they fought with the police outside. The vast majority of the crowd remained outside and watched the spectacle unfold in real time. If they didn’t do anything else — even if they were inside the perimeter — they have not been charged.”
That does not, of course, cover the four CHSs, including the highly popular Field Office 4 CHS, who went inside the Capitol. After all, the Justice Department, which has been hyperaggressive in pursuing Jan. 6 participants, knows who they are and knows they went inside the Capitol. Shipley speculates that the FBI might have made a “policy call” to give the CHSs a break on the grounds that the sources might have mistakenly believed their FBI handlers would have wanted them to go inside and check things out. Or maybe the bureau thought that prosecuting CHSs would make it harder to recruit new CHSs in the future. Or maybe the FBI did not want a messy prosecution that would inevitably reveal a lot about the FBI’s activities.
Whatever the case, it still means the FBI, which stonewalled Republicans in Congress on all sorts of issues during the first Trump administration, is being far less than transparent about what some of its secret informants did on Jan. 6. We know enough, for example, to know that the bureau was very happy with the work of Field Office 4 CHS, but we don’t know things like: How did he get into the Capitol? How long was he there? Who was he with? What did he do?
There are other things we don’t know as well. The report covers the FBI, which is under the purview of the Justice Department inspector general. But it does not cover the activities of the Capitol Police or the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, which are not part of the Justice Department. Did they have confidential sources or undercover agents? We also don’t know, as law professor Jonathan Turley has pointed out, whether the presence of the secret FBI sources was “revealed to the defense in the hundreds of prosecutions.”
Friday morning, reporter and DOJ critic Julie Kelly posted, “It struck me that not a single text between an FBI handler and CHS is included in the Horowitz report. No comms whatsoever. How is that an investigative work product?” Kelly also pointed out that Inspector General Horowitz could only review what the FBI gave him. Whether you think that is acceptable or not depends on your degree of trust in the FBI, which is quite low among Republicans these days.
So, there is a lot more to know about the FBI and its secret sources on Jan. 6. Yes, it’s good to know a specific number. But that’s not the whole story.
Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson
Trump, His Disrupters, and a Chance to Return to Normalcy?
Many of Trump first-round picks share some common themes.
One, many, who were in the past victimized by government bullies and cowardly bureaucratic grandees, or proved sharp critics of the administrative state, are now, in karma-style, in charge of the very agencies that hounded him.
So, Elon Musk, perennial target of government regulatory functionaries, was once policed, but now he polices the bureaucratic police.
Robert Kennedy, Jr., proposed overseer of government health programs, was often blasted as a crank by the subsidized scientists and the administrators within HHS whom he will now direct.
Pete Hegseth fought the military DEI machinery while a solider in the ranks and wrote a book about the corruption of the Pentagon. He will now, if confirmed, run the Pentagon.
Tulsi Gabbard was improperly put on a national security travel watch list as a supposed security threat—and now will be a guardian of our security as Director of National Intelligence.
Tom Homan was derided by the Biden administration and its Homeland Security minions as a fanatic border hawk; now he will run ICE and deal with the detritus of Biden fanaticism on the border.
Two, none of these appointments are traditional swamp creatures. Few rotate from the think tanks. This time around there are no retired “Wise Men” or retired four-stars. Few are Uniparty magnificoes revolving back into high government from their DC university or New York corporate and investment waystations. None are DEI, cover-our-identity-politics-base candidates.
By design, their past government service resumes are thin—few past undersecretaries of these or special assistant to those. And there are not a lot of suffixed alphabetic letters or prefixed long-winded titles that adorn their names.
In other words, they are vaxed from the sort of acculturated administrative state mindset that has alienated and terrified the citizenry.
Three, they all share a reputation from the mainstream media, bicoastal elite, or administrative state guardians as a little “out there” or even “crazy” and “nuts”, whether RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, or Pete Hegseth. So, their opponents rightly fear they are immune from mainstream media disparagements, the usually leftwing generated hoaxes, and beltway tsk-tsk scorn.
Fourth and finally, they are not radicals or nihilists. Rather, they are reformers who are trying to trim or eliminate bloated government machinery, or return institutions and agencies to their normal functions and original missions. In contrast, the last few years of Biden governance chaos and near insurrection were abnormal—and dangerous.
Destroying the border and breaking the law to allow 12 million to enter illegally were nihilist.
Stealthily routing government cash, to circumvent the law, to a communist Chinese-run viral gain-of-function engineering lab is beyond the belief.
Creating a commissar system in the military that demanded ideological orthodoxy over meritocracy, or the Chairman of the JCS secretly communicating with his People’s Liberation Army counterpart to warn about his own commander-in-chief’s stability was insurrectionist.
Weaponizing the DOJ by performance-art swat home raids on opponents, and collusion lawfare waged by local, state, and federal indictments against a former president and presidential candidate were un-American.
Asymmetrical prosecutions and FBI fusion with social media to censor the news were sheer government anarchy.
There are legitimate questions about the confirmability of Matt Gaetz, or his prosecutorial experience, or some of his alleged past excesses, but his very accusers were mostly quiet about the weirdos, creeps, and revolutionaries in the Biden administration—accused of stealing women’s luggage at airports, or lying that a subordinate “racist” border patrol whipped in slave-master fashion innocent would-be immigrants, or trying to fix a felonious presidential son’s sentencing to avoid the accustomed legal consequences of his criminal behavior.
In sum, the currently loud censors have zero credibility given the unprofessional, weaponized, and nihilist examples they have bequeathed.
THE CASE FOR MASS DEPORTATIONS.
November 11, 2024. Washington Examiner
President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to “launch the largest deportation of criminals in American history.” That is a quote from a Nov. 2 rally in Salem, Virginia, but Trump has said precisely the same thing dozens of times. Still, through the course of a long campaign, with his improvisational style, Trump has occasionally worded his pledge differently. For example, at his Madison Square Garden rally, Trump said, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out.” At an Oct. 25 event in Austin, Texas, Trump said he “will launch the largest deportation program in American history” before adding, “We have no choice. We have got to get all of these criminals, these murderers, and drug dealers, and everything, we’re getting them out.” Back on May 24, at his rally in the South Bronx, Trump pledged to “immediately begin the largest criminal deportation operation in our country’s history.” So, variations in wording aside, when Trump talks about mass deportation, he is talking about the mass deportation of criminals.
It’s hard to imagine opposing Trump’s proposal. Who would want to help murderers and drug dealers who entered the country illegally remain in the United States? Yet we have seen much talk that Trump deportation plans go far, far beyond criminals and will ultimately lead to 10 million, 15 million, or perhaps even 20 million people being removed from the country. Part of this is media hysteria. But part of it comes from loose talk by Trump and his advisers. In a Time magazine interview in April, in particular, the interviewer appeared to want Trump to announce that he would herd migrants into detention camps. After several questions, Trump finally said, “I would not rule out anything.” That, of course, led to speculation that Trump would herd migrants into detention camps.
But the Trump plan has been visible in plain sight for quite a while. First, the new administration will seek to deport quickly those illegal immigrants who are deemed national security threats. At the same time, it will pursue illegal immigrants with criminal records, either in the U.S. or some other country. And all the while, it will assign priority to the illegal migrants whose cases have already been adjudicated and ordered removed.
“You concentrate on the public safety threats and the national security threats first because those are the worst of the worst,” Tom Homan, recently named as Trump’s “border czar,” said over the weekend on Fox News. “So, it’s going to be the worst first. That’s how it has to be done. We know a record number of people on the terrorist watch list have crossed this border. We know a record number of terrorists have been released in this country. We have already arrested some [who were] planning attacks. So, look, the president is dead on when he said criminal threats, national security threats are going to be prioritized. And that’s the way it’s going to be.”
There is a clear guide for doing this. Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported that as of Sept. 30, 2023, there were 1,292,830 people in the U.S. illegally who have had full legal due process and have received a final deportation order from an immigration judge. In the ensuing year, there are estimates that number has grown to somewhere between 1.35 million and 1.6 million.
The vast majority of those people are not in detention. But they have had final orders of deportation, so they are subject to removal at any time. It’s just that the Biden administration has not removed them. “They were placed into removal proceedings before immigration judges, either because they entered illegally, or overstayed, or committed a crime in the United States,” said Andrew Arthur, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service official, Capitol Hill lawyer, and immigration judge currently with the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors more rigorous enforcement of immigration law. “Some of them have made asylum claims. Some didn’t make any claim at all. Some of them may have come many years ago, and they’ve been sitting on the docket for decades.”
Arthur said the U.S. has the resources to remove about 400,000 people per year. With more resources and more determination, that number could go to 600,000. So, even if the second Trump administration gets a quick start, and Trump is determined to do so, it could take years to remove those whose cases have already been decided. In doing so, Trump officials will likely use the same set of priorities — national security threats and criminals first. Then, it could focus on those with the most recent orders of removal. As for any on the list who were ordered deported decades ago but never left, authorities will have to decide what to do on a case-by-case basis.
Would Trump deportations go beyond that group of 1.35 million to 1.6 million already ordered removed? Remember that many more millions crossed illegally into the U.S. during the Biden years. What to do with them? The vast majority do not have valid claims of asylum or any legal right to remain in the U.S.
In an ironic twist, it is possible that the second Trump administration will rely on a document known as the Mayorkas Memorandum to decide those cases. On Sept. 30, 2021, as the border incursion was moving into high gear, Biden Department of Homeland Security head Alejandro Mayorkas sent the administration’s top immigration officials a set of guidelines for enforcing immigration law. In the memo, Mayorkas laid out rules for deporting illegal immigrants.
“We will prioritize for apprehension and removal noncitizens who are a threat to our national security, public safety, and border security,” Mayorkas wrote. The first group was terrorists and spies. The second was criminals. And then there was the third group, the threats to border security. “A noncitizen who poses a threat to border security is a priority for apprehension and removal,” Mayorkas wrote. “A noncitizen is a threat to border security if (a) they are apprehended at the border or port of entry while attempting to unlawfully enter the United States; or (b) they are apprehended in the United States after unlawfully entering after November 1, 2020.”
If Trump were to apply the Nov. 1, 2020, standard, the Mayorkas standard, to removals, deporting those who had most recently crossed illegally into the U.S., he would have a basis to reverse a significant part of the Biden border rush. “Those people are already a priority for removal,” Arthur notes, “so Trump could just say we’re doing what the Biden administration said it was doing.”
If Trump actually does any of this — that is, if he increases deportations with an emphasis on national security threats, criminal, and recent entrants — it will have a powerful deterrent effect on people in foreign nations considering illegal entry into the U.S. It will also likely motivate recent illegal arrivals into the U.S., the ones with the fewest connections to this country, to leave on their own.
Trump’s actions, if he takes them, could certainly be characterized as “mass deportations” since they would involve the removal of perhaps 1 million people. It would certainly be “the largest deportation of criminals in American history.” On one hand, it would not please the Trump supporters who want to deport every single person in the U.S. illegally. After all, every illegal border crosser has violated U.S. law by unlawfully entering the country. On the other hand, prioritized deportations would be a significant restoration of the rule of law as it applies to the U.S. border, and that would be a very good thing.
October 28, 2024
AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, THE WIDE WORLD OF TRUMP. New York — If you wanted to see living, breathing proof of former President Donald Trump‘s success in broadening the appeal of the Republican Party, you just had to look around his mega-rally in Madison Square Garden Sunday night. No, Trump did not draw hordes of fans from the deep-blue blocks of Manhattan surrounding the arena. Nearly everyone I talked to came in from Long Island, New Jersey, or the outer boroughs of the city, in particular the most outer of the outer boroughs, Staten Island. But if you were looking specifically for, say, Trump’s growing appeal to Latino voters, all you had to do was look around.
An extensive poll done last month by NBC News and Telemundo showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump by 54% to 40% among Hispanic voters. That 40%, should Trump actually achieve it, would equal the best Republican performance among Latino voters ever by President George W. Bush in 2004. (Remember that Trump won about 28% of the Latino vote in 2016 and about 32% in 2020. Both figures were significantly better than Mitt Romney and John McCain in the two elections before Trump.) The NBC-Telemundo poll showed Trump doing particularly well among male Latino voters, with whom Trump and Harris were tied, 47% to 47%.
These are extraordinary numbers, and they are particularly worrisome to strategists who have seen Harris’s support decline in some key areas of the Democratic Party coalition. They would find no solace at the Madison Square Garden rally.
Among the first people I met inside the Garden, as everyone waited for the program to begin, were Marc Vazquez and Engel Paulino, two friends from Brick Township, New Jersey. Vazquez’s family came to the New York area from Puerto Rico, while Paulino’s came from the Dominican Republic. Both are active in their local Republican Party.
Vazquez, who is 30 years old and works in marketing, explained that when he was younger, “I always believed I was a Democrat because that’s what my family identified as.” Republicans, he believed, were rich, out of touch, and didn’t care about people like him. Then, in 2014, around the time he turned 20, he started a business — it dealt with repairing phones and tablets — and found himself dealing with quite a few conservatives. They said all sorts of things critical of then-President Barack Obama. Vazquez found that frustrating and started doing some reading. “I realized they were right,” he said.
Trump joined the presidential race the next year. Vazquez was originally skeptical — initial skepticism is a common element of many rallygoers’ stories — but he was also intrigued by how much the media seemed to hate Trump. That is another common element of the stories. A lot of Trump supporters say they were originally struck by what they saw as a hostile media overreaction to Trump — in Vazquez’s case, it was over the issue of illegal immigration — and that it spurred them to take a closer look at Trump.
Vazquez found that he agreed with Trump on immigration. “It wasn’t about hate. It was about putting America first, making sure our laws were respected, and ensuring our communities were safe,” he said. Vazquez also found himself supporting Trump’s tax cuts, energy policies, deregulation, and more. He thought Trump “was focused on creating real opportunities, particularly for communities like mine, which had been overlooked by politicians for years.” In 2019, five years after he showed his first interest in politics, Vazquez joined the Brick Township Republican Party, in which he is now on the board. That’s how he ended up wearing a MAGA hat on the floor of Madison Square Garden, waiting for the biggest political rally in decades.
Engel Paulino wore a MAGA hat, too, a baseball cap turned backward, plus a “NEVER SURRENDER” T-shirt featuring the famous photo of Trump raising his fist after he was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania. (As an aside, I’ve covered a lot of Trump rallies, and I’ve never seen as much MAGA merchandise as I did Sunday night.) Paulino described living as a small child in the Dominican Republic, where his father had a furniture business. “A hurricane came by and destroyed the business, and my dad had a choice — either rebuild or listen to my mother and start a new life in the U.S.,” Paulino said. They came to New Jersey.
In New Jersey, Paulino recalled, “I watched my dad, as a truck driver, work 13-hour days. He would be gone for days at a time. He had a bed in his truck. And I watched him achieve the American dream. He went from a small one-bedroom apartment to a four-bedroom house in a matter of five to seven years.” His father is now a Pentecostal minister in Asbury Park.
Seeing his father’s work pay off had a deep effect on Paulino. He developed an interest in real estate and is now a realtor. He did not pay much attention to politics until Trump won the presidency in 2016. Like Vazquez, he was fascinated by the strong media antipathy to Trump. “I always wondered, ‘Why do they hate him so much?’” he said. He started paying more attention to politics and found that he agreed with what Trump was doing. He did some reading on the basic tenets of the Republican Party. “And most of those things I resonated with,” he said. “I believe in keeping the family together. I believe in having the opportunity to start your own business and grow. And I’m a Christian. I believe in protecting our religious views.” In 2020, Paulino voted for the first time, for Donald Trump.
Finally, Paulino said he strongly supports closing the U.S.-Mexico border. He also strongly opposes illegal immigrants receiving government benefits. “Americans should come first,” he declared. But he went on to add: “In my dad’s church, it’s a Hispanic church, there are a lot of illegals, there are a lot of immigrants. So, I feel for that community as well. I’m not ‘deport them all and get rid of them.’ I understand also from their perspective, especially the Dreamers, the ones who were brought to this country as a child, went to school here, and all they know is the U.S. I wish Trump was a little more lenient about that.”
As we talked, I heard a commotion behind me, and Paulino looked over my shoulder and said, “Oh, my gosh — I love her.” It was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), making her way through the crowd.
We parted ways, and the program began. Something happened early in the proceedings that would become the object of hugely negative news coverage. Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian and podcaster booked by the Trump campaign, did a kind of insult comic/roast routine that fell mostly flat with the audience. “There’s a lot going on,” Hinchcliffe said. “Like, I don’t know if you guys know this, but there is literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” The line did not get many laughs and quite a few groans, but it exploded on X. Trump detractors quickly denounced the rally as a “hatefest.”
It was a crude joke that led many to think: Why would the campaign book an insult comic for this event? It wasn’t a roast on cable TV. But there Hinchcliffe was, and the Trump adversaries who were ready to denounce the rally quickly made it Exhibit A in the night’s case against Trump. I texted Vazquez, with roots in Puerto Rico, and Paulino, with roots in the Dominican Republic, to see what they thought. Vazquez replied that he didn’t like what Hinchcliffe said but that “comedians often use exaggeration and sarcasm, and while this particular remark may have been harsh, it was intended as a joke rather than a factual statement.” As for whether it should be blowing up the internet, he noted that all of us encounter a wide range of material on the net, “and it’s up to individuals to decide whether to engage or simply scroll past content they find distasteful. We should be careful not to overreact to every comment, especially those intended to be a joke.”
As for Paulino, he wrote back later that night to say he is a comedy fan and knows Hinchcliffe’s style. “He’s known to be edgy — if you ever check out his show Kill Tony, you’ll see.” Paulino said when the comic made the “garbage” remark, he looked over at Vazquez and made a shocked face, and they both laughed. “Never thought about it again once he moved on to other jokes,” Paulino continued. “I honestly had no idea it would make headline news. It wasn’t until later I went on X and saw that AOC and Tim Walz were freaking out over it.” He saw the episode as something being blown out of proportion by anti-Trump media. “I have many Puerto Rican friends that will be voting for Trump,” he said. “I think it’s safe to assume Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke isn’t going to change that. No one at all is even talking about it in person. I’m still on the train with a lot of supporters. But for some reason, the internet can’t get over it.” The Trump campaign quickly issued a statement saying, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
There were other vulgar moments in the five-plus hour rally. The New York radio personality Sid Rosenberg was pretty unpleasant, as was a businessman named Grant Cardone. But the striking thing about the episode was the way in which media coverage blotted out the vast majority of what was said during the evening — the talk about Trump’s record on the economy, on the border, on national security, and the criticisms of the Biden-Harris record on those same issues and more. Surely that would merit some discussion, wouldn’t it? Without ignoring what Hinchcliffe and a few others said, couldn’t the reporting have given a more complete account of a very long event?
Look at the headlines. The New York Times topped its main article with “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism.” The Washington Post headline was “Trump rally speakers lob racist insults, call Puerto Rico ‘island of garbage.’” Resistance programming like Morning Joe did what it always does in such situations. It all meshed well with the Harris campaign’s messaging on the rally.
The New York Times report had one thing right: “It was all a surreal scene.” Indeed, it was. Looking at the list of speakers, there was the name Scott LoBaido, described as a “live painter.” Sure enough, LoBaido, an artist originally from Staten Island with a lot of resentment against the Manhattan art world — he gave them the finger at the end of his routine — came onstage with a blank canvas and painted a picture of the American flag and Trump, all in the time it took to play a recording of “America the Beautiful.” Later, wrestler Hulk Hogan reprised his act from the Republican National Convention. Then, a man billed as a childhood friend of Trump, David Rem, pulled a crucifix out of his pocket and waved it as he praised Trump, criticized New York Mayor Eric Adams, and offered to campaign in Spanish for Trump in the swing states.
It was all evidence of the fact that, in his 78 years as a New Yorker, Trump has collected a colorful cast of characters around him. And, of course, he’s one, too. That’s one of the things that makes him interesting and has sometimes made it hard for him to fill the conventional role of president of the United States. The Madison Square Garden rally, a sprawling, audacious political achievement by a Republican candidate in one of the deepest blue places in the country, was also an achievement in showmanship because that’s just who Donald Trump is.