Is James Dolan a Republican? This suggests Trump’s MSG rally.

Always a front row seat.
Photo: Garrett Ellwood/NBAE/Getty Images

Until this weekend Donald Trump he spent most of his time in Madison Square Garden as a viewer watching the Knicks or Rangers with children, his wifeand other stars such as Howard Stern and – this will excite some conspirators – John F. Kennedy Jr. But on Sunday, Trump will finally headline the world’s most famous arena himself, one of the last stops of his third presidential campaign. Trump allies to say that he, as one of his advisers, had been “obsessed” with the idea for months he said The Wall Street Journal that the rally would be “a pretty popular ticket” and that it would be “the biggest Trump rally we’ve ever seen.”

Not everyone in the liberal bastion of New York is as happy as the Trump campaign. “Allowing Trump to hold an event at MSG is equivalent to the infamous Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939.” he tweeted Brad Hoylman-Sigal, state senator representing the Garden District. “This is a disastrous decision by Madison Square Garden.”

Who exactly made the decision to hire Trump is an open question, but at some point the documents must have landed on the desk of immediate CEO and owner James Dolan. For years, it was difficult to determine the politics of Dolan, the billionaire son of HBO’s co-founder who has donated to both Democrats and Republicans, seemingly switching parties when it convenient for him. (Dolan, a notoriously rare media presence, did not respond to requests for comment.) Ahead of Trump’s rally in Dolan’s backyard, we gathered evidence about his political life to see what it looks like when it’s all in one place.

Like many billionaires, Dolan has given a lot of money to Trump over the years. In 2016 he wrote a check for $300,000 to a Trump-supporting PAC. The next year he made $125,000 again donation to Trump’s fundraising committee the same week the president told the Golden State Warriors they couldn’t come to the White House to celebrate the NBA championship.

When he asked regarding the donation, a Knicks spokesman said Dolan is a “longtime friend and supporter of President Trump.”

In 2002, Dolan and about 400 guests traveled to Donald Trump’s South Florida resort for his second wedding, which Trump and a small number of guests attended. other media executives. In 2018, Dolan, in a rare interview with Trump, cited his Mar-a-Lago wedding as one of the reasons he is close to Trump ESPN: :

“I’ve known him for a long time. I got married at Mar-a-Lago. I am a Mar-a-Lago member and support it as a friend. And you don’t have to agree with everything he does to support him. By the way, he’s our president and I don’t understand people who want our president to do badly. Why would you want your president to do poorly? It’s like asking the milkman to bring you sour milk.

In 2022, Dolan, who was not a fan of dissent, landed in trouble after he banned members of law firms that sued him, prohibiting them from using facial recognition technology to prevent those lawyers from watching their beloved Knicks and Rangers games. In January 2023, Dolan began to lose the narrative of his dystopian takedown of the lawyer, bringing props for television interviews and claiming that facial recognition technology has been used since the first days of humanity. (He meant “eyes”).

In response to the PR crisis, Dolan hired Hope Hicks, a former Trump adviser maybe or not provided the former president with Covid-19 in the final days of the 2020 election. Hicks was apparently consultant, so it’s unclear what she actually did other than charging a substantial fee. But lawsuits over the facial recognition mess have been thrown out of court.

One of the most telling examples of Dolan’s relationship with money and politics was when he donated to a Republican House candidate in New York after a Democrat in the race ridiculed him. In 2020, then-Rep. Max Rose he said that Dolan has to sell the Knicks because of him constant tinkering with the squad destroyed the team. Nothing is happening. Every year they don’t make the playoffs, New York loses,” he told TMZ. “We are losing a piece of our soul. Sell ​​tomorrow. Sell ​​today. Do it for the good of all of us, brother!”

In response, Dolan donated $50,000 to Republican candidate Nicole Malliotakis, who ultimately defeated Rose for a seat to represent Staten Island and parts of southern Brooklyn. Dolan again in a rematch in 2022 given to Malliotakis so that there would be one less politician in office in New York who didn’t like him.

In 2021, it seemed like Dolan had a change of heart, at least locally. In the first-ever open primary elections in New York, the billionaire took part in the Democratic race for mayor to replace Bill de Blasio. Dolana given $5,000 to former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire but also $2,000 to another former Republican, Eric Adams. Most likely, Dolan saw a chance to influence the only primary election that mattered this year in an extremely Democratic city; Besides, $7,000 doesn’t mean much to him. (Dolan also made a donation 5 million dollars group that educated voters on conservative-leaning platforms such as crime and how to stop the “exodus” from cities due to quality of life issues).

But it’s been like that ever since given hundreds of thousands to Democratic state Assembly candidates to protect them from progressive upstarts who might be interested in eliminating the tax breaks that allowed him to keep a garden atop Penn Station without paying property taxes – a gift from the state government that saved his hundreds of millions for years. Despite the many controversies surrounding Eric Adams, Dolan remained loyal to the mayor, donating $5,000 to a legal defense fund after the feds seized his phones last November.

Political rallies at Madison Square Garden include more than just Donald Trump and German-American Nazis, with campaign events hosted there by politicians including: Dewey Warren, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, George McGovernAND Ralph Nader.

I brought this story to Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a senator who was one criticized for comparing the Trump event to a Nazi rally. “I think Trump is unparalleled and unprecedented in presidential history in courting far-right white nationalists,” he said. “That’s the distinction I noticed.”

“I don’t know why we would judge James Dolan any other way than that he has the most famous arena and sports team,” he added. “But if we criticize him, we should criticize… number of Fortune 500 CEOs who are Trump supporters and are residents of New York.”