A week before the election, Trump will hold his most unsettling spectacle yet | Sidney Blumenthal

Trump has been inevitably drawn to the Garden, in the city that made and unmade him. He is irreversibly entrapped in his endless neurotic syndrome of desperately seeking approval there that he constantly repels and success he inexorably undermines, a cycle of failure, rejection and humiliation. He wants New York to love him unreservedly, but his relationship with the city has been one long unrequited romance. His true love affair has always and only been with himself. When he does not receive the adoration he feels he deserves, he hates New York. Then, he tries to win its love again by performing a disgusting act, which, when he is predictably rejected, triggers his anger once again. And, then, he engages in gestures of infantile defiance, like holding a Nazi-esque rally. Trying to show himself triumphant over the city, he invites its scorn once again, and again, and again. He never comprehends that he is the cause of his continuing narcissistic injuries.

After Trump had plunged in what seemed to be his final bankruptcy, he was rescued by a TV producer, Mark Burnett, who created the reality TV show The Apprentice, which depicted Trump as a business genius reigning over the Manhattan skyline. The sheer fiction was the veneer that enabled his grubby lucrative product placement side deals. His motive for running for president was a branding scam gone haywire.

Now, he has returned to the city on his road to redemption. Yet, so far, he has been held accountable for his vast crimes only in New York. He has been found liable for defamation and sexual assault and termed an adjudicated rapist by the judge in the E Jean Carroll case, and ordered to pay $83.3m in damages plus continuing interest; found liable of widespread financial fraud and ordered to pay $364m for ill-gotten gains plus continuing interest; and convicted of 34 felony counts of financial fraud for hush-money payments, to a porn star and Playboy model with whom he had affairs, in order to affect the outcome of the 2016 election.

Once again, he intends to prove himself in the city that never sleeps, the city that will give him another shot at murdering someone on Fifth Avenue and getting away with it. A star is reborn.

Now, New Yorkers can only wonder, what kind of schmuck holds a Nazi-esque rally in Madison Square Garden?