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DNC projects message tying Trump to Hitler on Madison Square Garden during rally
The Democratic National Committee is projecting digital messages on Madison Square Garden’s exterior during former President Donald Trump’s campaign rally on Sunday about recent reports that he once praised Adolf Hitler and his generals and that cast him as unhinged.
“Trump praised Hitler,” one of five planned projections from the DNC says, referring to Trump’s longest-serving chief-of-staff, four-star Marine Corps. Gen. John Kelly, telling The Atlantic this week that Trump had admirable things to say about the German dictator.
Trump says he “never said it,” and campaign aides have denied Kelly’s accounts.
Sunday marks the first time the DNC is projecting counterprogramming onto a building while Trump will be inside it, but it’s far from the first time Democrats have deployed the technique. The DNC put projections on Trump Tower in New York City on the night of the vice presidential debate and on Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower during the Democratic National Convention in August.
Democratic National Committee
This time, the stunt comes as some Democrats make comparisons to a 1939 rally supporting Hitler and the Nazi party at a previous reiteration of Madison Square Garden ahead of World War II. Billed as a “Pro American Rally,” the February 1939 event was organized by German American Bund, an pro-Hitler organization, attended by more than 20,000 people and saw an even larger number of counter-protesters outside.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz on Sunday also compared Trump’s rally there to the 1939 rally.
“Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden,” Walz said, speaking to voters in Nevada. “There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid 1930s at Madison Square Garden. And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there.”
Walz and Vice President Kamala Harris have recently increased their criticisms of the former president as they push their final message to voters in the final stretch ahead of the election. In a CNN town hall, Harris agreed that Trump was a fascist and Walz has called comments from the former president “so damn racist.”
In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Hillary Clinton said Trump’s choice of venue for his closing message was no coincidence and that he was “actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939,” following similar comparisons from others including New York state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal.
Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt fired back to say Clinton herself has held events there while her husband, former President Bill Clinton, accepted the Democratic nomination there in 1992.
“Putting aside her hypocrisy, Hillary’s rhetoric about half of the country is disgusting,” Leavitt said in a statement.
Sunday’s rally comes just days after Kelly also told The New York Times Trump has little appreciation of history, saying, “I think he’s lacking in that.”
Trump also personally rebuffed the criticism at a rally later on Friday in Michigan, distancing himself and his base from the comparison.
“I guess in the 1930s or something, some guy who was inclined toward the Nazis had something, and she said it’s just like the 1930s. No, no, this is called Make America Great Again,” Trump told a crowd in Traverse City.
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison didn’t go as far as to make the same comparison as Clinton but told CBS News in a statement he sees Trump as having “grown increasingly unhinged in the final weeks heading into Election Day; so much so that those who know Trump best are warning voters that he is dangerously unfit to lead.”
To that end, the DNC is also projecting messages onto Madison Square Garden questioning Trump’s competency including, “Trump = Unhinged” and “Trump = Unwell.”
David Schwartz, a trial attorney in New York City, has previously told CBS News it’s illegal to project digital signs in New York City for longer than 60 seconds without a permit. A spokesperson with the DNC, however, said they are aware of the law and complying with it by rotating through individual messages.
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McDonald’s beef patties test negative for E. coli in Colorado, Department of Agriculture says
Colorado has seemingly eliminated one ingredient as a cause for death and illness, as states continue to investigate the source of an E. coli outbreak involving the Quarter Pounder hamburger at dozens of McDonald’s locations. As a result, the Quarter Pounder will begin to return to certain locations.
The Colorado Department of Agriculture announced McDonald’s brand “fresh and frozen beef patties” tested negative for E. coli after its lab analyzed dozens of subsamples.
CDA says it has completed all beef testing and does not anticipate receiving further samples.
Meanwhile, the federal investigation into the deadly E. coli outbreak in Colorado has focused on ground beef patties and onions. There continues to be no evidence that onions grown in Colorado are linked to the outbreak.
According to McDonald’s, The 900 restaurants that historically received slivered onions from Taylor Farms’ Colorado Springs facility will resume sales of Quarter Pounders without slivered onions. Those restaurants are in Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming, as well as portions of Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Utah. The restaurant chain also noted it has stopped getting onions from that facility indefinitely.
“The issue appears to be contained to a particular ingredient and geography, and we remain very confident that any contaminated product related to this outbreak has been removed from our supply chain and is out of all McDonald’s restaurants,” McDonald’s North American Chief Supply Chain Officer Cesar Piña said in a statement Sunday
Since the outbreak was first announced, CBS News Colorado confirmed one older man on the Western Slope died after consuming a Quarter Pounder from a McDonald’s location in the state. Initial information also confirmed more than two dozen people had become ill due to E. coli-affected Quarter Pounders.
Nationwide, this outbreak has sickened 75 people in more than a dozen states, but Colorado remains the only state impacted that has experienced a death due to it.
The Colorado Department of Public Health says there have been 26 cases reported in nine different Colorado counties, and they are located in several different parts of the state:
- Arapahoe County
- Chaffee County
- El Paso County
- Gunnison County
- Larimer County
- Mesa County
- Routt County
- Teller County
- Weld County
The illnesses were reported between the last days of September and through Oct. 11. An investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into the outbreak is ongoing.
McDonald’s company leaders previously said they’ve taken Quarter Pounders off the menu in states where there have been outbreaks.