Always get the dog's name

Before we move on to (ahem) today's events at Madison Square Garden, let's take a moment to see how much of American journalism can be packed into a single tabloid front page: here, the New York Daily News of Feb. 22, 1939:

● Always get the dog's name! That's Fritz, barking at the cops in an attempt to defend his injured master, Chester Brooks, 61, of W. 5th St., Manhattan.
● Style policy reveals style politics.* If there's a dog name rule, there's probably also a rule that tells Daily News staffers which other names are important; hence, "kisses wife" but "hugs son Gerald, 2."
● Don't just tell me what I'm seeing; tell me why I'm seeing it. Isidore Greenbaum was run in for jumping on the stage and trying to punch Fritz Kuhn -- not, regardless of the Hillary Clinton comment that got Fox News's panties in a wad last week, a "neo-Nazi," but the real thing.
● Sometimes it's OK to break the fourth wall. If a World Series victory allows the paper to declare heroes, surely attempted Nazi-punching could license the declaration of an "anti-fascist hero."

The parallels between the German-American Bund's 1939 rally and (ahem) today's events are entertaining if a bit inexact. The Trump rally, after all, is nine days before a national election in which he's the candidate of a major party. If Trump will be "actually reenacting" anything, the more likely template is "all his other rallies of the past few weeks"; batshittery about dog-eating aliens or sex-change surgeries during study hall is likely, with a nonzero chance of Arnold Palmer's penis and some somnolent dancing to Ave Maria. (Update: Should have anticipated the sort of gutter racism that seems to get the Trump cult especially excited, as it's on full display.) And the sort of large-scale revulsion that was shared even by the right-wing press seems unlikely at this writing.

For all that, the buildup in the Trumpist media has been steady. Fox had two side-by-side
stories about the Clinton outrage at the top of the homepage on Friday, and rally precedes led the page Saturday night and Sunday morning. But that's hardly out of step with Fox's campaign coverage in general. Indeed, several ongoing themes for both Fox and the Trump campaign suggest closer parallels with a different gathering at Madison Square Garden: the Oct. 30, 1941, America First rally, held as US involvement in the Atlantic war deepened (a U-boat sank the destroyer Reuben James the next day). See if the "enemy within" vibe from the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a bit of a ring to it:

Perhaps more interesting than the rally itself was the run-up -- particularly the Foxoid sense that The Truth was being kept from The American People. Here's the Daily News's editorial from the morning of the rally:

"These men are news," the editorial proclaims. "... When the big radio chains bar these men from the air because they are anti-war, we think they are guilty of bad reporting." Behind the curtain, of course, the editorial sees the shadowy reach of a left-wing administration that "has the power of life and death" over the networks through the FCC's licensing power, while a supine Congress "lacks the courage to object."

The News (at least, in A.J. Liebling's telling) had moved firmly into the isolationist camp in 1941. The America First rally was not its first expression of concern about the airwaves; here's a front from that May:

 

If you're put in mind of Tucker Carlson's complaint earlier this year -- 'Most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine. They’ve never heard his voice. That’s wrong': Carlson -- it'd be hard to say you're too far wrong.

* Thanks to Deborah Cameron for this one.