From the minute Donald Trump announced his plan to stage a campaign rally in Madison Square Garden, it invited comparisons to the pro-Hitler rally held there by American Nazis in 1939. If that might have been an unfair allusion to make ahead of the event, the actual substance of his Sunday gathering in the heart of New York City laid such concerns to rest: By the time Trump had even hit the stage, in fact, what had transpired successfully evoked that predecessor movement much more explicitly than even Trump’s harshest critics might have imagined.

There were the racist statements targeting Puerto Ricans, Latinos, Black people, Palestinians, and Jews; the description of Vice President Kamala Harris as a “Samoan, Malaysian, low IQ” individual; the prominent display of a font regularly used in Nazi campaigning on the hat of Trump’s shadow running-mate, Elon Musk; and the speeches featuring rhetoric used by Adolf Hitler. One of the event’s speakers even described the night as a “Nazi rally” in his own remarks. That’s the language many used to condemn the rally, with over half a million people on Twitter describing it as a “Nazi rally” in the hours after the event.

Conspicuously absent from this condemnation was an organization that one might have hoped to see at the forefront of naming and shaming such dangerous rhetoric: the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL. ADL was founded in the early 1900s to combat antisemitism and “secure justice and fair treatment for all,” with a self-described “understanding that the fight against one form of prejudice cannot succeed without battling prejudice in all forms.” On its website, the organization specifically spotlights how in the 1930s, as the “cloud of Fascism spread across Europe, inspiring sympathetic homegrown movements in America,” ADL singled out the “pro-Nazi agitation of the German American Bund”—the organization that held the original Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.

So how, with all that storied history behind it, did ADL respond to Trump’s 2024 Nazi rally? “Political rallies should be about politics and policy, not offensive jokes,” the organization wrote, in a bizarrely anodyne message that did not even name the presidential candidate........

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