The Bronx Rally

It's hard to enumerate all the takeaways from Trump's Bronx rally, which seems to have dominated yesterday's news. It's a contrarian's paradise.

Let's go to what almost nobody's mentioned, the attempt by the left at a counterdemonstration:

When I exit the park, I happen upon dozens of police officers in riot gear. Young men and women—draped in keffiyehs and many in N95 masks—are standing behind them on a giant rock, shaking a sign that says, “[redacted] Trump / [redacted] Biden / The people of the Bronx / We run this [redacted].”

“They don’t give a [redacted] about you,” the protesters chant at the Trump crowd, clapping between words.

The police were there in riot gear to anticipate any contingency, but my impression from the few accounts in the media is that there simply weren't enough potential counterdemonstrators there to start a riot, much as they would have wanted one. I imagine that the media was disappointed, too -- a riot would have been clickbait, and it would have fed the narrative that Trump supporters are brownshirts, but it didn't happen.

This brings me to something else that didn't happen -- the George Floyd-BLM riots of 2020-2023 began the Tuesday following the Memorial Day weekend of 2020, May 26 of that year. One of the conditions that fed those was the COVID lockdowns, when the authorites from Dr Fauci on down announced that rioters were exercising their first amendment rights:

Fauci said that public health officials like himself should caution protesters to wear a mask and keep it on at all times if they do go out to protest.

On the other hand, apparently holding a Trump campaign rally during the pandemic was not an equivalent exercise of first-amendment rights, as Trump canceled a good many throughout that campaign, and those he did hold were heavily criticized:

President Donald Trump’s campaign rallies led to more than 30,000 coronavirus cases, according to a new paper posted by researchers at Stanford.

. . . The researchers found that the rallies ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19. They also concluded that the rallies likely led to more than 700 deaths, though not necessarily among attendees.

On the other hand, the "researchers" didn't find any equivalent spike in COVID cases after the BLM riots!

Protests against systemic racism held in 300-plus U.S. cities following the death of George Floyd did not cause a significant increase in coronavirus infections, according to a team of economists who have published their findings in a 60-page paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research; these somewhat surprising results are supported by Covid-19 testing data in many populous cities where demonstrations were held.

I was intrigued to watch one discussion of Thursday's Bronx rally where a commentator minimized it saying that Trump had huge crowds everywhere in 2020, but he still lost. No, actually, he didn't, he canceled a good many rallies throughout 2020, and the COVID moral panic attached a stigma to attending the ones he did hold. There was a contrarian opinion in 2020 that the COVID panic was generated specifically at least in part to limit Trump's ability to campaign via rallies, and whether the intent was there, it certainly succeeded in doing this.

In addition, BLM riots were tacitly endorsed by the public health authorities, while Trump rallies were discouraged, so BLM riots became one of the few outlets for people with cabin fever to vent their frustrations, when Trump rallies were represented as a public health menace. This year, people at least have a clearer choice between Trump rallies and BLM riots, and so far, with the campus pogroms as the exception, people seem to be choosing Trump rallies.

I doubt if there's time to gin up a new epidemic to have an equivalent effect before November -- the 2020 lockdowns began, after all, that March. Instead, we have the New Jersey and Bronx Trump rallies establishing powerful countervailing media examples -- in 2020, media coverage of BLM riots gave the impressionable "permission" to use them as an outlet, while "permission" to attend Trump rallies was implictly withheld.

In 2024, with the media somewhat befuddled and definitely behind the curve, Trump rallies are major media events. Trump is an entertaining figure in his own right, but South Bronx residents wearing MAGA hats are also a man-bites-dog story that the media has to cover in spite of itself. And the Bronx rally took place just before a slow news holiday weekend.

Do you seriously think Trump doesn't understand this? He's had four years to recalibrate and rethink his strategy, but it's also better to be lucky than smart. Trump at this point is both.