PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Donald Trump on Tuesday called his rally at New York's Madison Square Garden, an event marked by crude and racist insults by several speakers, a “lovefest.”
That's a term the former president also has used to reference the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Speaking to reporters and supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump claimed “there’s never been an event so beautiful” as his Sunday night rally in his hometown of New York City.
“The love in that room. It was breathtaking,” he said. "It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest. And it was my honor to be involved.”
That's despite criticism from Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign and many who watched — including Republicans — about racist comments made by speakers during the pre-show targeting Latinos, Black people, Jews and Palestinians, along with sexist insults directed at Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe's set, in which he joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage,” stirred particular anger given the electoral importance of Puerto Ricans who live in Pennsylvania and other key swing states. The Trump campaign took the rare step of distancing itself from Hinchcliffe's joke about Puerto Rico but not other comments.
The president of Puerto Rico’s Republican Party, Ángel Cintrón, called the “poor attempt at comedy” by Hinchcliffe “disgraceful, ignorant and totally reprehensible.”
“There is no room for absurd and racist comments like that. They do not represent the conservative values of republicanism anywhere in our nation,” Cintrón said in a statement.
Trump used the event at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday to criticize Harris' record on the border and the economy, saying that, “On issue after issue, she broke it" and “I’m going to fix it and fix it very fast."
With just a week before Election Day, some Trump allies have voiced alarm that the event, which was supposed highlight his closing message, has instead served as a distraction, highlighting voters' concerns about his rhetoric and penchant for controversy in the race's closing stretch.
Speaking before the event to ABC News, Trump said he didn’t know the comic who delivered the most egregious insults, but he did not denounce the comments either.
“I don’t know him, someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is,” he said, according to the network, insisting that he hadn’t heard Hinchcliffe's comments. But, when asked what he made of them, Trump "did not take the opportunity to denounce them, repeating that he didn’t hear the comments," ABC reported.
Trump is set to campaign later Tuesday in Pennsylvania, a state where the Latino eligible voter population has more than doubled since 2000, from 206,000 to 620,000 in 2023, according to Census Bureau figures. More than half of those are Puerto Rican eligible voters.
He also will hold a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which has a large Hispanic population, on Tuesday night.
Angelo Ortega, a longtime Allentown resident and former Republican who’s planning to vote for Harris this time around, said he couldn’t believe what he'd heard about Trump's rally.
“I don’t know if my jaw dropped or I was just so irritated, angry. I didn’t know what to feel,” said Ortega, who was born in New York but whose father came from Puerto Rico. Ortega has been campaigning for Harris and said he knows of at least one Hispanic GOP voter planning to switch from Trump to Harris as a result of Hinchcliffe’s comments.
“They’ve had it. They’ve had it. They were listening to (Trump), but they said they think that that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Ortega, a member of the Make the Road PA advocacy group.
Trump “didn’t make the comment about Puerto Rico. The comedian made the comment about Puerto Rico. But it is his political forum.”
___
Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York, Danica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Michael Rubinkam in Allentown, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.
Adriana Gomez Licon And Michelle L. Price, The Associated Press