“When Someone Shows You Who They Are …”

Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” If you ever needed to know who Donald Trump is, he and his acolytes provided you with it in their reprehensible performance at Madison Square Garden on Sunday Night. This was at a rally that many think was planned to echo a Nazi rally, also famously held at Madison Square Garden, on February 20, 1939, fewer than seven months before Nazi Germany invaded Poland, triggering World War II.

While Trump’s rally on Sunday was more subtle than the Nazi rally (which called for a “social just white gentile–ruled United States” see 3:36 into A Night at the Garden), it did feature a “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe (host of the Kill Tony podcast), who thought it was amusing to call Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

A common methodology of right-wing demagogues these days, Trump included, is to show who they are, then try to deny it, as if the public can’t see they are trying to play it both ways. And we saw that after Trump’s rally, when Danielle Alvarez, a Trump senior adviser told NBC News last night:

“This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

This morning, on the “fair and balanced” Fox and Friends, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt repeated the party line. As reported by NBC News, she said:

“Look, it was a comedian who made a joke in poor taste… Obviously, that joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or our campaign. And I think it is sad that the media will pick up on one joke that was made by a comedian rather than the truths that were shared by the phenomenal list of speakers that we had.”

But, for me, the most telling response was the one from an unnamed Trump ally, as told to Rolling Stone:

“Who booked this f***ing jerk?”

The answer to that question is clear: He was booked by the same people who are trying to pretend that what he said shouldn’t reflect on them. They booked him because they calculated that whatever damage he caused would be partially mitigated by saying “That was him. Not us. Not Trump,” and then outweighed by the get-out-the-vote value of repeating the worst racist “jokes” Hinchcliffe could serve up. And did he serve it up. He claimed to have “carved watermelons” with a Black member of the crowd, and made a joke about Jewish people being stingy.

If we take Karoline Leavitt’s advice and pay attention to “the truths that were shared by the phenomenal list of speakers,” we also have:

• David Rem—Harris is “the devil” and “the Antichrist.”
• Tucker Carlson—Harris is “just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” (Of course, he’s getting her ethnic background and intelligence wrong for “comic” effect.)
• Grant Cardone—Harris and “her pimp handlers will destroy our country.”

Finally, Trump came on. Briefly, he stuck to the script, which said “The Republican Party has really become the part of inclusion.”

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” No matter what Trump and his handlers say, the racist, sexist, and personal attacks that have dominated this campaign from the Republican side reflect who they are. They cannot erase them, and I believe they don’t want to, because these statements reflect who they are.

Kamala Harris is the candidate who has reached out to include marginalized communities. She’s the one who is building a coalition to move us forward.

We have one week left, vote and make sure your friends and family have a plan to vote, sign up to phone bank. We need a president who respects and includes people based on shared humanity, not one who builds a coalition based on fear and division.