PALM BEACH, Fla. — Urged by some allies to apologize for racist comments made by speakers at his weekend rally, Donald Trump took the opposite approach on Tuesday, saying it was an “honour to be involved” in such an event and calling the scene a “lovefest” — the same term he has used to describe the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Trump gathered supporters and reporters to his Mar-a-Lago resort two days after a massive rally at Madison Square Garden featured a number of crude remarks by various speakers, including a set by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe in which he joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.” Some of Trump’s top Republican allies have condemned the remarks, and his campaign took the rare step of publicly distancing itself from Hinchcliffe’s joke, though not the other comments.
But given the opportunity to apologize, both at Mar-a-Lago and in an earlier ABC interview, Trump instead leaned in. Speaking at his Florida resort, he said that “there’s never been an event so beautiful” as his Sunday rally in his hometown of New York.
“The love in that room. It was breathtaking,” he said. “It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest. And it was my honour to be involved.”
With just a week before Election Day, some Trump allies have voiced alarm that the rally, which was supposed to highlight the Republican presidential nominee’s closing message in grand New York fashion, has instead served as a distraction and even a liability, given the electoral importance of Puerto Ricans who live in Pennsylvania and other key swing states.
Trump was set to hold a rally later Tuesday in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a city with a large Hispanic population, where Puerto Rico’s shadow U.S. senator, Zoraida Buxo, will join him, according to a campaign official who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of a formal announcement.
Buxo, who does not have a vote in the Senate because Puerto Rico is not a state, voiced her support for Trump in a post on the social media site X. She said Trump is the “strong leader” that Puerto Rico needs.
The fallout from the Madison Square Garden event risked highlighting voters’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric and penchant for controversy in the closing stretch as both campaigns are scrambling for votes. Speakers at the rally also made racist comments targeting Latinos, Black people, Jews and Palestinians, along with sexist insults directed at Trump’s Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
On Tuesday, Trump tried to move past the controversy and pivot back to Harris, lashing his rival’s record on the border and inflation, saying that, “on issue after issue, she broke it” and “I’m going to fix it and fix it very fast.”
Trump, who took no questions at the event, accused Harris of running a “campaign of absolute hate,” and claimed she keeps “talking about Hitler and Nazi, because her record’s horrible.”
Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff said in recent interviews with The New York Times and The Atlantic that the former president praised Adolf Hitler while in office and suggested that the Nazi leader “did some good things.”
In an interview with ABC News earlier Tuesday, Trump tried to distance himself from Hinchcliffe but did not denounce what he said.
“I don’t know him. Someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is,” Trump said, according to the network, insisting that he hadn’t heard Hinchcliffe’s comments. 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.
The comments have drawn outrage from Puerto Rican leaders.
The archbishop of Puerto Rico called on Trump to disavow them, saying it wasn’t enough for the campaign to say the joke didn’t reflect Trump’s views. The president of Puerto Rico’s Republican Party called the “poor attempt at comedy” by Hinchcliffe “disgraceful, ignorant and totally reprehensible.”
In Pennsylvania, where Trump was to campaign later Tuesday, the Latino eligible voter population has nearly tripled since 2000. More than half of those are Puerto Rican eligible voters.
Angelo Ortega, a longtime Allentown resident and former Republican who’s planning to vote for Harris this time, 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.
Still, some Republican Puerto Ricans weren’t fazed. Lydia Maldonado, who attended Trump’s event in Florida on Tuesday, said in Spanish that it was important to note that the former president was not the one who made the comment about Puerto Rico.
“He is a comedian. He tries to be funny and says a lot of nonsense. The man is dumb. He has no clue about Puerto Rico and doesn’t know our culture. He screwed up. We have to forgive and let it go,” said Maldonado, who is Puerto Rican.
The Harris campaign has released an ad that will run online in battleground states targeting Puerto Rican voters and highlighting the comedian’s remarks.
— Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York, Danica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Nicholas Riccardi in Denver and Michael Rubinkam in Allentown, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.