Another speaker likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute with “pimp handlers.” A third called her “the Antichrist.” And the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked Ms. Harris — the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father — with a made-up ethnicity, saying she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

By the time the former president himself took the stage, an event billed as delivering the closing message of his campaign, with nine days left in a tossup race, had instead become a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.

If the parade of speakers felt at times like a Republican National Convention reunion — Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Carlson, Vivek Ramaswamy, Alina Habba, Lee Greenwood, the Trump family all appeared — they seemed to have returned for a bonus fifth night that was more inflammatory than the original in July.

The rally served as a capstone to an escalating series of remarks from Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly said in recent days that one of the gravest threats that America faces is “the enemy within.” Democrats have cranked up warnings of Mr. Trump’s descent into authoritarianism as John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff, warned that Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist.

“When I say ‘the enemy from within,’ the other side goes crazy,” Mr. Trump said on Sunday, mocking his critics.

Since early in his campaign, he has broadly promised an era of “retribution” if he wins. But after a relative lull earlier this year, he has grown more specific of late, including promising prosecutions against a variety of people if they’re deemed to have “cheated” in the election and to fire the special counsel, Jack Smith, who brought two federal indictments against him, and even suggesting throwing him out of the country entirely.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump described the date of his potential election as a “liberation day” from what he described as an occupation by invading migrants.

Ms. Harris’s campaign seized on the spectacle, and some Republicans, including from Florida and Puerto Rico, denounced the comic’s comments about the island. Several influential Puerto Rican superstars, Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, Luis Fonsi and Ricky Martin, lent their voice for Ms. Harris on Sunday.

But Mr. Trump has paid little political price over time for his own inflammatory remarks in the past — he has disparaged cities with large Black populations such as Detroit and Milwaukee this year — let alone those of his surrogates and supporters.

The marathon of speeches — Mr. Trump took the stage two hours after scheduled — was often infused with more self-indulgence than political strategy. Mr. Trump plainly enjoyed playing the Garden, which bills itself as “the world’s most famous arena.”

“Kamala, you’re fired!” Mr. Trump said, returning to the line that he first made famous as host of “The Apprentice.”

But he went so long that the crowd had begun to thin noticeably before he had finished his 78-minute speech.

The event was a spectacle that captured the unusual and sometimes ugly range of the MAGA movement that has taken over the Republican Party from the inside over the last nine years.

Hulk Hogan flexed his muscles and ripped off his clothes, just as he did at the convention. Donald Trump Jr. called his father a “badass.” The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who has poured $118 million of his fortune to aid Mr. Trump so far, entered to a video of his rocket booster landing, pumping his fists in the air. He promptly predicted the federal budget could be slashed by one-third even as Mr. Trump rolled out deficit-expanding tax breaks.

Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser who influenced Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown, used nativist language as he argued that only Mr. Trump would stand up and say “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

The big surprise was a rare public speech by Melania Trump, who introduced her husband and exited the stage with him after he had finished, as the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” blared.

The arrival of thousands of red hats at the symbolic arena at the center of a blue city in a blue state was celebrated by Trump supporters who relished the chance to collectively thumb their noses at the New York and national elite.

“Selling out the Garden means the MAGA movement has now arrived,” Jack Posobiec, the right-wing activist with a big following on social media, said in an interview. “It’s Madison Square Garden, it’s the center of everything, and to have this place filled with MAGA hats and Trump supporters really goes to show you it’s not just the surprise win of 2016 — it’s a nationwide movement.”

It was lost on no one that Mr. Trump was just miles from where he was convicted of 34 felony counts earlier this year and still awaiting sentencing, and a short jaunt to Trump Tower, where he opened his first presidential campaign in 2015.

The singular nature of Mr. Trump’s candidacy was emblazoned in slogan form on the scoreboard above as he began to speak: “Trump will fix it.”

Mr. Trump opened by asking the crowd a timeworn political line: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” It is at the core of Mr. Trump’s campaign against Ms. Harris ever since she replaced President Biden, a switch he remains sore about. Despite being delivered in a city that four years ago was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic and still deep in shutdowns and closed businesses, and swimming in a high death toll, that line landed well.

Mr. Trump’s vows of mass deportation and inveighing against undocumented immigrants had an audience in New York City, too, where thousands of migrants who crossed the southern border without authorization have been given sanctuary and some residents have complained about the use of city services to help them.

So many of the day’s warm-up speeches were spent portraying the former president as he wants to be seen. Several speakers talked about him surviving a July assassination attempt not in spiritual terms but in muscular ones, describing his toughness at “dodging” the bullet. Many also falsely claimed he “built” the skyline in a city in which he was always seen as a B-list developer with a small portfolio of buildings that he acquired long after they were constructed.

“The king of New York is back to reclaim the city that he built,” his son, Donald Trump Jr., declared anyway.

The elder Mr. Trump, who normally speaks only glowingly about his late father, Fred, from whom he inherited millions of dollars and the spine of his real-estate company, delivered a surprising line about his parents as he reflected on how they would be receiving word of his legal travails.

“I know my mother’s in heaven, I’m not 100 percent sure about my father, but it’s close,” Mr. Trump said, to laughter in the arena.

It was all a surreal scene.

At one point, the painter Scott LoBaido received a huge cheer when he flipped a middle finger to the crowd before grabbing a paintbrush to paint an American flag as “America the Beautiful” boomed. The grand finale was revealing an image of Mr. Trump hugging the Empire State Building.

Later, the television host Phil McGraw, known as Dr. Phil, lectured the crowd on why Mr. Trump did not fit the definition of “a bully” because a bully requires “an imbalance of power,” seeming to ignore the fact that Mr. Trump has enormous power as a billionaire and former president.

During the speech by Mr. Trump’s running mate, Mr. Vance, the entire arena spontaneously burst into chants of “Tampon Tim” to disparage Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris’s running mate.

“You all can say that,” Mr. Vance smiled. “I probably shouldn’t say that.”

It was a rare moment of restraint at the microphone.

David Rem, a childhood friend of Mr. Trump, called Ms. Harris “the devil.” Grant Cardone, a businessman, declared that the sitting vice president had “pimp handlers.” Sid Rosenberg denounced Hillary Clinton as a “sick son of a bitch” for linking the Trump rally and a pro-Nazi event at the arena of the same name decades ago.

Mr. Rosenberg called the entire Democratic Party “a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew-haters and lowlives. Every one of them.”

When the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made his remark about Puerto Rico, there were groans from many in the audience.

On the same afternoon, Ms. Harris was in Philadelphia, courting Pennsylvania’s significant Latino population and stopping by Freddy & Tony’s, a Puerto Rican restaurant.

“Timing is everything,” David Plouffe, a top Harris adviser, wrote on X, posting clips of the two side-by-side.

In his White House bid, Mr. Trump has banked on winning uncommon shares of Black and Latino voters, in part by leaning into culture wars that split the Democratic Party.

In his speech, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. invoked his uncle, former Senator Ted Kennedy, for creating Title IX for women’s sports. He used that heritage to defend his own current opposition to transgender women participating in sports.

Mr. Carlson marveled aloud from the stage at following the party-switching Mr. Kennedy. “It’s a realignment,” he declared. “It’s unbelievable.”

Twenty years ago, in the same arena, Rudolph W. Giuliani delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Republican National Convention, three years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack prompted then-President George W. Bush to caution the nation against hate.

On Sunday, Mr. Giuliani leaned into overbroad stereotyping against the Palestinian people, who he said “are taught to kill us at two years old.”

“I don’t take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at 2,” he said. “I’m on the side of Israel.”

Mr. Giuliani praised Mr. Trump for coming to the city where he once served as Republican mayor.

“This is where a Republican is not supposed to come,” Mr. Giuliani said. “Which is why Donald Trump came here.”

During the event, billed as “An Afternoon With Liz Cheney,” Ms. Cheney fielded questions from the anti-Trump Republican George Conway. Ms. Cheney, who represented Wyoming, served in the House Republican leadership before she was ousted after vocally opposing Mr. Trump. As Ms. Harris’s most prominent G.O.P. supporter, she has appeared with her on the campaign trail, serving as a messenger to conservatives, particularly women, in key swing states.

She discussed several of what are considered to be Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities — his stance on abortion access, the Jan. 6 riot, rampant election denialism, the decision to select JD Vance as his running mate, his relationship to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and some of Mr. Trump’s more erratic recent behavior.

When the event concluded, Ms. Cheney was given a lengthy standing ovation.

Pat Alexander said she had driven more than 10 hours from Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., to hear Ms. Cheney speak.

“I really admire her, and I admire how courageous she had to be to take a stand,” said Ms. Alexander, who is a Democrat.

Grace Williams Winkler and her husband, Richard Winkler, who had driven to Newark from Rhode Island, said they were particularly affected by Ms. Cheney’s description of the events on Jan. 6.

“It was really cathartic to be in the room with her,” said Ms. Williams Winkler, also a Democrat. “It gives one hope.”

Ms. Cheney recalled that during the Capitol riot, Representative Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, put his arm around her and offered to help her and other women evacuate the House chamber.

“Get away from me — you effing did this,” Ms. Cheney said she responded.

She also touched on the recent decisions by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times not to publish endorsements in the presidential race, which she said were concerning not because of the potential impact on the election, but “because it is all about fear.”

Fear is “a tool that every autocrat uses,” she said.

The remarks at the rally came as Ms. Harris wrapped up a day in Philadelphia, where she spent time courting Pennsylvania’s significant Puerto Rican population by visiting a local Puerto Rican restaurant. While there, she talked about a new plan she announced on Sunday to bring economic opportunities to Puerto Rico, discussed her visit there after Hurricane Maria, and said that even as a senator she had “felt a need and an obligation” to “make sure Puerto Rico’s needs were met.”

“This is not a new area of focus for me,” she said. She received a warm reception from the crowd, with chants of “Sí, se puede.”

Before the Trump rally on Sunday, Ms. Harris had already taken aim at her Republican rival in a video message to Puerto Rican voters. She noted that, as president, Mr. Trump had resisted sending aid to the island after back-to-back hurricanes, adding that he had offered nothing but “paper towels and insults.”

“I will never forget what Donald Trump did and what he did not do when Puerto Rico needed a caring and a competent leader,” she said.

The video was widely shared, and the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny posted it on Instagram. He is one of the biggest recording artists in the world and among the most influential Latino artists. Other celebrities with Puerto Rican backgrounds also shared the video, including Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin.

“Quite a split screen,” Kevin Munoz, a Harris campaign spokesman, said in a statement, calling the offensive language at the Trump rally “no surprise.” The campaign also sent out a news release titled “All the Crazy Things (So Far) at Trump’s ‘Closing Argument’ Madison Square Garden Rally.”

The Trump campaign appeared wary of the political fallout from the “island of garbage” remark and other comments. A senior adviser, Danielle Alvarez, said in a statement, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

Fresh off a blitz of star-studded rallies, Ms. Harris focused on retail politicking in Philadelphia on Sunday as her campaign makes its final push to mobilize working-class communities and people of color to the polls.

In neighborhoods across the city, Ms. Harris delivered tailored messages to different groups of voters as she continued her effort to secure the crucial “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It was Ms. Harris’s 14th visit to Pennsylvania since she became the Democratic presidential nominee, and her seventh to the Philadelphia area.

“Victory runs through Philly,” she said while visiting a Black bookstore, Hakim’s Bookstore and Gift Shop. “It runs through Pennsylvania.”

Ms. Harris started the day at a predominantly Black church, where she warned parishioners that “these next nine days will test us,” and brought them to their feet when she told them, “We were born for a time such as this.”

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“These next nine days will test us. They will demand everything we’ve got. But when I think about the days ahead, and the God we serve, I am confident that His power will work through us because, Church, I know we were born for a time such as this. [cheers] And I have faith He is going to carry us forward. And the road ahead won’t be easy. It will require perseverance and hard work. But in times of uncertainty Scripture reminds us: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning!”

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At a barbershop, Philly Cuts, she talked about the need to recruit and retain more Black male teachers, which was part of an economic agenda her campaign unveiled this month that was targeted at Black men. Ms. Harris spent an hour at the barbershop speaking with several Black men, and was invited to sit in a “magical” chair at the back of the shop; the barbers said every candidate running for elected office who had sat in the chair had won her or his election.

Darryl Thomas, 52, the owner of Philly Cuts, said that Ms. Harris had spent much of the time discussing what Black men were looking for from their next president. He said that she had “good dialogue” with the group.

“Black males are the most disenfranchised individuals in America,” he said. “This is a time when the playing field needs to be leveled and fair. We’re not asking for extras.”

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We have nine days, nine days to get this done. And for the next nine days, no one can sit on the sidelines. There is too much on the line, and we must not wake up the day after the election and have any regrets about what we could have done in these next nine days. So let’s spend these next nine days knowing we did everything we could, that we connected with each other, with our neighbors, that we went up to perfect strangers in the grocery store and said: “You know what? I see you.” Let’s approach this moment in a way that in the face of a stranger, we see a neighbor. And let’s talk with each other about what we have in common.

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Ms. Harris ended her day with a get-out-the-vote rally at a community center, during which she told energetic supporters they had the “power” to make their voices heard at the ballot box.

“There is too much on the line, and we must not wake up the day after the election and have any regrets about what we could have done in these next nine days,” she said. “So let’s spend these next nine days knowing we did everything we could.”

Mattathias Schwartz, Jazmine Ulloa and Katie Rogers contributed reporting.

The comic, Tony Hinchcliffe, was the warm-up act ahead of several other speakers whose remarks were laced with vulgar insults, profanity and racist comments.

The crowd inside Madison Square Garden was predominantly white, with a significant number of Latinos. Many groaned at Mr. Hinchcliffe’s insult to Puerto Rico. Still, he told a tasteless, vulgar joke about the size of Hispanic families, mentioned watermelons as he called out a Black man in the audience and mocked Palestinians as rock-throwers and Jews as cheapskates.

At roughly the same time on Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris was in Philadelphia courting Pennsylvania’s sizable Puerto Rican population with a stop at a local Puerto Rican restaurant, Freddy & Tony’s.

But in New York, Mr. Trump’s rally featured a series of speakers whose remarks were far outside of longstanding political boundaries.

One, Sid Rosenberg, a conservative radio host, referred to Hillary Clinton with profanity and a sexist epithet. And Grant Cardone, a businessman who spoke early in the program, referred to Ms. Harris as if she were a prostitute. Later in the program, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, mocked Ms. Harris’s racial identity and intelligence as he jeered the idea that she could win in November.

He and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez talked about the politics of Congress, where Mr. Walz served before he became governor and the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee. They compared the House to “public school,” with the Senate being more like “private school.” The House, they agreed, is where policy for the nation is shaped, and Mr. Walz said he would have been proud to have voted for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a signature achievement of President Biden’s administration.

As the talk turned to the Senate and its procedures, Mr. Walz said knowingly to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez: “I don’t know where you stand, but I’m going to guess you and I are probably the same on the filibuster.”

“Oh yeah, we have got to get rid of that thing,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez responded.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was an early proponent of removing the filibuster several years ago. Vice President Kamala Harris said in September that she would support ending the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade. After the stream ended, a Walz campaign official said that Mr. Walz “shares the vice president’s position.”

In their Bills-Vikings Madden matchup on Sunday, which Mr. Walz and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez played for just a scoreless first half, they discussed housing policy and she asked him about voters who might be frustrated by the huge sums of money in politics or by the Biden administration’s positions about the war in Gaza. Twitch showed that about 12,500 people were watching on Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s channel.

“For people who are most frustrated, they need to see stuff getting done,” said Mr. Walz, who did not address the war in the Middle East directly.

They also discussed the importance of building coalitions. Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign has sought to draw Republicans turned off by former President Donald J. Trump, in addition to motivating core Democratic voters. The Twitch stream was part of a broader effort by the Harris campaign to reach men — and young men in particular.

“I do not think Governor Walz would have hopped on here if he didn’t value the power of the coalition we have here,” said Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who has become an emissary to skeptical young progressives for the Harris team.

The stream ended with Mr. Walz showing Ms. Ocasio-Cortez a favorite game he plays on the Sega Dreamcast called Crazy Taxi. The name aptly described Mr. Walz’s driving style as he scrambled around as a taxi driver picking up fares while driving on the wrong side of the road.

“Is this how you drive in real life?” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez quipped.

Before they closed, Mr. Walz noted the unique nature of the moment.

“Do you think a vice president has gamed?” Mr. Walz asked. “I do not think Dan Quayle was gaming.”

Then Mr. Walz departed the stream and headed to a local Mexican restaurant to watch some real-life football. The Las Vegas Raiders were playing.

In an email circulated to Democrats about what messages have been most effective in its internal testing, Future Forward, the leading pro-Harris super PAC, said focusing on Mr. Trump’s character and the fascist label were less persuasive than other messages.

“Attacking Trump’s Fascism Is Not That Persuasive,” read one line in bold type in the email, which is known as Doppler and sent on a regular basis. “‘Trump Is Exhausted’ Isn’t Working,” read another.

The Doppler emails have been sent weekly for months — and more frequently of late — offering Democrats guidance on messaging and on the results of Future Forward’s extensive tests of clips and social media posts. The Doppler message on Friday urged Democrats to highlight Ms. Harris’s plans, especially economic proposals and her vows to focus on reproductive rights, portraying a contrast with Mr. Trump on those topics.

“Purely negative attacks on Trump’s character are less effective than contrast messages that include positive details about Kamala Harris’s plans to address the needs of everyday Americans,” the email read.

Chauncey McLean, the president of Future Forward, issued a rare statement to The New York Times downplaying the significance of the Doppler email.

“Don’t over-read this,” he said. “This is just one of our regular emails sharing testing results from thousands of pieces of earned and social media content. It shows people that the most effective way of using Trump’s words and behavior is tying them to consequences in voters’ lives. That’s what Kamala Harris does every day by comparing her to-do list with his enemies list, for example.”

Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Ms. Harris’s campaign chair, said on Sunday on MSNBC that it has “real impact” that people close to Mr. Trump have spoken out against him.

“We know anecdotally, we know from our research, when someone like John Kelly stands up and speaks about what it was like to serve under Donald Trump, speaks about how he clearly wants unchecked power,” she said. “The American people are not comfortable with that.”

The Doppler email said Ms. Harris’s response to Mr. Kelly’s remarks during her town hall on CNN were only in “the 40th percentile on average for moving vote choice,” meaning it does less to push voters toward the vice president than other messages that scored higher. In contrast, a clip of Ms. Harris on Howard Stern’s program promising to expand Medicare to cover in-home care for the elderly tested in the 95th percentile, the email said.

Ms. Harris’s campaign did turn the audio of Mr. Kelly into a television ad but has spent relatively little on it so far.

In a public memo over the weekend, the Harris campaign signaled that her “economic message puts Trump on defense” and was likely to be a focus in the final week. “As voters make up their minds, they are getting to see a clear economic choice — hearing it directly from Vice President Harris herself, in her own words,” Ian Sams, a spokesman for Ms. Harris, wrote in the memo.

Ms. Harris is scheduled to deliver what her campaign has billed as a closing speech on Tuesday at the Ellipse in Washington — the same location where Mr. Trump rallied the crowd that eventually stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Campaigns and super PACs cannot directly coordinate strategy so sending messages via emails such as Doppler is one way they can communicate via quasi-public channels.

But the email’s warning reflects an underlying split among Democrats about what constitutes an effective line of attack against Mr. Trump, and how to persuade the small group of uncommitted voters to cast ballots against someone whose aberrant political and governing behavior has become familiar to them over nine years.

Ms. Harris’s team had made it clear immediately after the Democratic National Convention that they planned to switch from the message that President Biden had used most, that Mr. Trump is a unique threat to the country. They argued that making Mr. Trump smaller in the minds of voters was crucial. In her convention speech, she called him an “unserious man” but warned that restoring him to power would have “extremely serious” consequences.

In the last few weeks, Ms. Harris’s message on the campaign trail has been more in keeping with Mr. Biden’s earlier warnings about Mr. Trump as an unstable opponent. “Unhinged, unstable, unchecked,” all appear on the screen of one recent Harris ad.

The Dopper email warned: “Focusing on Trump’s disturbing, ludicrous and outlandish behavior can be an effective lead-in to talking about substantive policy, but is not effective at moving vote choice on its own.”

Ms. Harris’s most-broadcast ad in the last week does that, beginning with a warning of Mr. Trump “ignoring all checks that rein in a president’s power” before shifting to grocery prices, Social Security, abortion and taxes.

But her campaign has spent more than $10 million on a 30- and 60-second ad in that period also focused on Mr. Trump’s “handpicked” advisers warning about him. “Take it from the people who knew him best,” the narrator says. “Donald Trump is too big a risk for America.”

The ad fared relatively poorly in Future Forward’s ad testing, according to results obtained by The New York Times and shared with Democratic allies. After voters were shown the ad, it moved the race between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump by only 0.7 percentage points, where the most effective ads can shift the matchup by 2 percentage points.

Vendors did a brisk business in “Make America Great Again” ball caps. Members of a pro-Trump Jewish group threw arms around one another’s shoulders and sang a prayer in Hebrew. Some enthusiastic supporters predicted a red tsunami so huge that it could engulf even New York, where the former president trails in the polls by about 15 percentage points. Among likely voters in New York City, he is behind by 39 points.

Gregory Lamb, 27, from the Westchester County suburb of Mamaroneck, N.Y., and his father weaved through the thick crowd to get to the front of a “special guest” line. Mr. Lamb had gotten tickets through a campaign connection after volunteering to be a poll watcher.

“Kamala said during the debate that people don’t show up to Trump’s rallies, and that people are always bored and want to leave,” Mr. Lamb said. “I wanted to show her that we show up — and look how many people are around. We’re here and we’re not going anywhere.”

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As the introductory speakers started inside the Garden, about 100 protesters assembled on the steps of Moynihan Train Hall across Eighth Avenue. Jennifer Fisher, 64, of Manhattan held up a sign with a photo of a 1939 pro-Hitler rally held at the Garden (which was then in another location).

She said she had a 93-year-old relative who had fled the Nazi regime in Austria through the Kindertransport program. “She told me one day she woke up, and half the world was crazy,” Ms. Fisher said. “That’s what it feels like now.”

Nadine Seiler, 59, held a sign that read, “Trump Should Be in Prison Now.” She had made it for a visit to New York in July, when Mr. Trump was initially scheduled to be sentenced after his felony convictions.

“This is New York City; there’s no way these people should outnumber us,” said Ms. Seiler, looking at the MAGA crowd.

The people in the pro-Trump crowd came from far and wide, arriving from Long Island and Queens and Staten Island and from as far away as Orlando, Fla.; Charleston, S.C.; and Arlington, Va. There was a large New Jersey contingent and some from Connecticut.

One supporter from New York City, Randy Ireland, 50, said he was often met with negative comments when he wore his MAGA hat in his neighborhood, Long Island City in Queens.

Mr. Ireland, an Air Force veteran, worries about the possibility of crime committed by recent migrants, some of whom stay in shelters near where he lives.

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He mentioned the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which has made inroads in New York City and is one of Mr. Trump’s frequent talking points on illegal immigration. The police say gang members have been snatching cellphones and robbing high-end department stores.

Mr. Ireland expressed sympathy for migrants who come for a better life but said that regarding illegal immigration, “There needs to be some accountability in Washington for how it affects the rest of us.”

On a New Jersey Transit train rumbling up the Jersey Shore toward New York, Danielle Roman, 26, a nursing student headed to the rally, said that she believed Mr. Trump was a better advocate for women than Vice President Kamala Harris, including on abortion.

“He wants to leave it up to the states, which I agree with,” she said.

Some New Yorkers who had not heard about the event seemed mystified.

Adam Jackson, a bartender from the Bronx, stepped out of the subway and froze when he saw the throng of Trump fans filling the corner.

“It’s jarring,” said Mr. Jackson, 24. “Why? Why?”

Shortly after 3:30 p.m., big screens outside the Garden flashed bad news to those still waiting: The venue, which has an advertised capacity of 19,500 minus the space taken up by a production, was full.

For Dan and Richele Skarda of Woodbridge, N.J., who had been in line for an hour, the trip was still worth it.

“I got to see it, I got to feel it, I got to experience it,” said Mr. Skarda, 57.

Ms. Skarda added, “I’ve had more fun here now than I’ve had in forever.”

The couple planned to have dinner in the city, and Mr. Skarda suggested they find a motel in New Jersey. This would tide them over until their next date in two weeks: Iron Maiden at the Prudential Center in Newark.

“What he said, and I do agree with this, what he said is that the biggest threat we have in our country, it’s not a foreign adversary, because we can handle these guys,” he said. “We can handle foreign conflicts. We can’t handle — look, under Nancy Pelosi’s long life in public leadership, the United States has gone from the pre-eminent industrial power of the world to second next to China. That fundamentally belongs on Nancy Pelosi’s shoulders.”

And Mr. Vance, who appeared on Sunday morning news shows on CBS News, CNN and NBC News, sought to defend Mr. Trump against the recent warnings from several people who served in high-ranking roles in the Trump administration that the former president posed a threat to democracy.

John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was Mr. Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, said last week that Mr. Trump had praised Hitler and Hitler’s generals and met the definition of a fascist. And Gen. Mark A. Milley, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, was quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book, “War,” calling Mr. Trump “fascist to the core.”

Mr. Vance sought to portray the former Trump administration officials who have criticized Mr. Trump as warmongers, or as bitter at having been fired.

And he downplayed the significance of Russia’s spreading disinformation in American elections, saying that it was bad but suggesting there was little the country could do about it.

On CNN, Mr. Vance was pressed on the threats that Mr. Trump has been making to political adversaries. Those threats include describing his opponents as an “enemy from within”; vowing to imprison people he deems to have “cheated” in elections, as he falsely accused Democrats and election officials of doing in 2020; and reposting calls on social media for specific Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans to be jailed or subjected to military tribunals.

“None of that sounds fascistic to you at all?” CNN’s Jake Tapper asked.

“No, of course it doesn’t,” Mr. Vance replied, denying that Mr. Trump had made some of the threats in question and saying that in other cases his words had been taken out of context.

All week long, famous people had been popping up on the campaign trail for Vice President Kamala Harris. There was Eminem in Michigan. James Taylor in North Carolina. Bruce Springsteen, Samuel L. Jackson, Tyler Perry and Spike Lee in Georgia. And, yes, Beyoncé, in Texas (Willie Nelson, too).

You had to wonder if some piece of Mr. Trump wasn’t at least a little jealous.

The celebrity equation is a complicated one for the former president. A former television star himself, he seems to crave the approval of famous people. But their contempt for him has its uses, too. Democrats use celebrity worship to motivate their base. Mr. Trump has celebrity hatred to motivate his.

To be famous is to be elite; to be a fervid Trump supporter is to hate and feel hated by elites everywhere.

The stampede of stars stumping for Ms. Harris in the final days of the presidential campaign just reinforced a grand narrative that Mr. Trump and his supporters tell themselves about the journey they are on together, in which they must take on all sorts of powerful forces arrayed against them. Movie stars and military generals, media personalities and musicians — it’s all one big cabal between Washington, New York and Hollywood. Beyoncé is the Deep State.

It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, a 10-year flame war between the entertainment world and Mr. Trump, whose most devoted supporters draw ever closer to him and farther from everything else. Their relationship with popular culture becomes predicated on its stance toward this one man. Some become increasingly alienated and angry as the list of A-listers they’re not supposed to like gets longer. Some grow defensive. They seek out new celebrities to call their own.

These tortured dynamics have played out powerfully in response to the celebrity mania on the campaign trail.

On Thursday, while Mr. Springsteen was opening for Ms. Harris in Atlanta, thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters waited for him to appear at a college sports stadium in Las Vegas. Michael McDonald, the chairman of Nevada’s Republican Party, warmed up the audience. “Walking in here was fantastic,” he said, because he saw “so many celebrities — but they’re our celebrities.”

There was a performance by Common Kings, a reggae-rock band, and speeches by Vivek Ramaswamy and Tulsi Gabbard, who ran for president as a Democrat last time but recently became a Republican to support Mr. Trump.

Danica Patrick, the racecar driver, told the audience they ought to be proud to be Trump supporters, that they’re “an army of brilliant human beings” united in a fight against censorship. Gina Carano, the Trump-supporting actor who was dumped by Disney after she compared the experience of Jews during the Holocaust to the current U.S. political climate, spoke of her anguish at being blackballed by Hollywood. She railed against the town.

“A lot of celebrities say, ‘I’m leaving the country if someone I don’t like is installed in power,’” she said. “I plan on staying here and fighting it out. That’s what patriots do. That’s what the people who truly love Americans do.” The crowd erupted when she told them that Elon Musk, the richest person in the world and a recent convert to Trumpism, was funding her lawsuit against the Mouse House.

Mr. Trump’s supporters love that they can now count Mr. Musk — a true celebrity — as one of their own. They cheer at every mention of his name. Other stars hitting the trail for the former president this season are not quite as high-wattage: Dennis Quaid, Brett Favre, Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan. (Mel Gibson endorsed Mr. Trump this week, too).

Jack Posobiec, a right-wing conspiracy theorist, told the crowd that if Mr. Trump were to win, they would all be able to go back in time to “an America where a family can take their kids out to the drive-in under the stars” without worrying “that the movie would teach them to hate their country.” This was perhaps overly optimistic — would wresting back control of the executive branch also somehow put them in charge of the movie studios? — but the point was taken nonetheless. These Americans are not buying what Hollywood is selling. They clapped along.

Some were feeling tetchy about all the celebrities working against them. “All these people that have all this money that are up there talking to us about who we need to vote for, they don’t go to the grocery store, they don’t get their cars filled at the gas station,” said Kim Kinsman, a 65-year-old retiree from Las Vegas who had worked for a bakery company.

She said she would never watch another Julia Roberts movie again. Beyoncé, she said, “doesn’t know anything about anything.” What about Taylor Swift? “Worthless,” Ms. Kinsman said. “I agree,” added Heather Pelton, a 42-year-old Las Vegas homemaker who was standing nearby.

Other Trump supporters reasoned that the Democrats’ use of entertainers was a sign of weakness. Many of the famous faces boosting Ms. Harris are the same ones who tried and failed to get Hillary Clinton over the line in 2016. Ms. Harris “needs them more than ever,” said Sheila Mehrens, a 74-year-old retiree from Henderson, Nev. “She can’t get up and do something like Trump does,” Ms. Mehrens said, “so she’s got Bruce Springsteen.”

Mr. Springsteen’s performance for Ms. Harris in Georgia was evidently on Mr. Trump’s mind as well. As soon as he took the stage in Las Vegas, he said, “In Georgia tonight, they say that Kamala has just absolutely bombed.” But Mr. Trump also admitted that he was curious to see the stars come out for her, almost in spite of himself. “In fact, I was going to watch it, I didn’t want to come out, I wanted to watch that first,” he said.

“Isn’t that terrible?”

That was not quite how things played out.

The resident declined to stop projecting the logo. In response, the town aimed bright spotlights at the tower to dim the political message, and began fining the resident $100 per day for violating its bylaws.

By last week, the resident had stopped beaming his pro-Trump message — but refused to sign an agreement pledging not to do it again. The town is still shining spotlights on the tower to prevent any more partisan displays.

Supporters of former President Donald J. Trump rallied at a local intersection last weekend in defense of the resident. Local officials said their efforts to keep the water tower free of political messaging had cost the town money and had resulted in a flurry of vulgar phone calls and emails from supporters of the resident.

“This is a deeply unfortunate and unnecessary situation that the town of Hanson and its residents and government officials did not ask to be placed in,” the town’s five-member governing board wrote in a statement last week. Town officials did not respond to written questions from The Times, including about how much the town is spending on the spotlights.

The town has not publicly identified the resident. A copy of a cease-and-desist order in the matter that has circulated online named the resident, but The Times could not verify the person’s identity. The order also listed an address, but a person at that house declined to speak to The Times about the dispute.

Hanson, which has about 10,000 residents, is among the most politically divided places in Massachusetts. While President Biden easily defeated Mr. Trump in the state in 2020, winning 66 percent of the vote, Mr. Trump eked out a narrow victory in Hanson with 3,314 votes, compared with 3,244 for Mr. Biden.

Just after sunset on Thursday, the onion-shaped bulb of the water tower glowed brightly against the darkening sky, lit up by several sets of high-powered lights that town workers had arranged around its base. The tower’s surface was a blank slate, bearing no hint of a political message. The drone of generators powering the lights drowned out the chirp of crickets.

At the house listed on the cease-and-desist order, a man who spoke to The Times through a speaker near the door declined to say whether he had projected the sign or answer questions about the conflict.

On the house’s lawn, alongside several small Trump signs, was a large cutout image of the water tower illuminated by the Trump logo.

While social media lit up with debate about Hanson’s “Trump Tower,” most residents approached by The Times in recent days declined to voice opinions on the dispute.

Mark Vess, 73, who lives near the water tower, said on Saturday that he could not comprehend why the town was continuing to shine the spotlights — “subjecting neighbors to the incessant roar of industrial generators from dusk to dawn” — when his neighbor had stopped projecting the Trump sign more than a week ago.

“I’ve heard very few people say, ‘Oh gee, that guy might light the tower up again. The town should keep spending thousands of dollars in case he turns it back on,’” said Mr. Vess, a lifelong resident of Hanson who is retired. “They’re making fools of themselves.”

His support for his neighbor notwithstanding, Mr. Vess said that he found Mr. Trump “reprehensible,” and that he planned to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.