Trump doesn’t address NY rally backlash in winding Mar-a-Lago event
PALM BEACH, Florida — Donald Trump during remarks on Tuesday didn’t acknowledge that there was any backlash over a comedian who made disparaging comments about Puerto Rico at a recent rally in New York City.
“The love in that room, it was breathtaking — and you could have filled it many many times with the people that were unable to get in,” he said of his Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden.
Trump told ABC News’ Rachel Scott before the press conference that he wasn’t familiar with the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
“I don’t know him, someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is,” he told ABC News.
His speech on Tuesday before an audience of hundreds of supporters in South Florida largely appeared to be geared toward counter-messaging the campaign rally Vice President Kamala Harris had set for Tuesday evening. The vice president is expected to deliver the closing message of her campaign on the Ellipse just off the National Mall in D.C.
Since Trump’s rally Sunday — when Hinchcliffe and other speakers at the event made racist and vulgar comments — Puerto Ricans, Democrats and Republicans have condemned the speakers and defended the island. Trump has not publicly condemned the comments, while Puerto Ricans, including the archbishop of San Juan and the Republican chair of the island, have called on the former president to apologize though he has not done so.
People of Puerto Rican descent in the key swing state of Pennsylvania, who number more than 450,000, have also denounced the comedian’s comments and some are planning to protest Trump’s rally Tuesday night in Allentown, which has one of the largest populations of Puerto Ricans in the state.
Trump called Harris’ political operation a “campaign of hate” and said President Joe Biden had been “out of it for a long time.” He did not take any questions from the media after speaking for about an hour and tore into some Democrats who’d compared his rally to Nazi Germany.
The speech explored dark themes about illegal immigration and the economy, as a TV behind the former president read, “Trump will fix it.”
“This is a campaign that has been long, hard,” he said toward the end of his remarks. “I have been campaigning for 58 days and I haven’t taken a day off.”
His campaign previously said the comments about Puerto Rico didn’t represent his views but Harris’ campaign seized on them in a new ad and many Republicans spoke out against the offensive remarks. On Tuesday, Harris’ campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, told reporters on a call that there could be “some new segment of voters that are open to supporting us” after the New York City rally. After the Sunday event, Puerto Rican artists Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin endorsed Harris.
Nearly 1 million people of Puerto Rican descent live in swing states that will decide the presidential election and most tend to vote for Democrats. More than 3.2 million live on the island but cannot cast votes for president.
When Trump was president, he fought with the mayor of San Juan over the federal emergency response to Hurricane Maria in 2017 and called leaders there “grossly incompetent” following the storms. He falsely accused Democrats of inflating the death toll from the storm to make him look bad, though the total of almost 3,000 deceased included deaths after the immediate destruction of the storm. When he visited the island he threw paper towels into the crowd of people gathered at a church to collect relief supplies.
Harris campaign launched a new TV ad on Monday blasting Trump’s handling of the rally and Democrats in several states have seized on Hinchcliffe’s comments to tie down-ballot Republicans to the rhetoric. They’ve also pointed to a promise Harris made recently to have an appointee oversee a new “Puerto Rico Opportunity Economy Task Force,” which would address ideas such as making the electric grid more resilient against storms and extending tax credits to pay for energy-efficient appliances and electric vehicles.
Trump did unveil a new campaign promise at Mar-a-Lago, vowing if reelected that his administration would seize assets of criminal gangs and drug cartels and use them to set up a compensation fund for the victims of migrant crime.