Donald Trump accused Kamala Harris of launching a hate campaign at his Mar-a-Lago club, days after his New York rally was embroiled in racist and crude remarks. He accused his aides of infiltrating voters during the runoff, and worried that his aides had infiltrated voters in the runoff. Presidential election days.
The event was open to reporters, but Trump took no questions and almost certainly would have been asked about the rally’s vitriolic rhetoric, but claimed Harris was stirring up division in an effort to change the narrative. did.
It was also an attempt to pre-empt a potentially damaging day for the Trump campaign. Later Tuesday, Ms. Harris will speak at a rally at the Ellipse in Washington (the same venue as Mr. Trump’s rally just before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol), directly linking her to the riot.
“It’s actually a campaign of destruction, but it’s actually a campaign of hate probably more than anything else. This is a campaign of hate,” Trump said of Harris. “Yesterday I said she is a vessel, a very large and powerful party with wise people, but evil and possibly trying to destroy our country.
“Because who would want to open our borders to allow millions of people to come in from prisons and the worst gang members in the world? Who would want this for our country?” Trump said.
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President Trump also took sharp offense at opponents who compared his rallies to Nazi rallies. “There was love in the room,” Trump said, shaking his head.
But there were no questions asked about the first speaker’s comments during Sunday’s six-hour rally at Madison Square Garden, where he described Puerto Rico as a floating island of trash and talked about black people cutting watermelons. This means that President Trump could not object.
Later that day, Mr. Trump will travel to Pennsylvania, a win-win state, for a rally in Allentown, which is home to a large population of Puerto Rican immigrants and their descendants, and will try to clean up damage in districts his campaign cannot afford. To alienate.
The Trump campaign’s operating procedure for years has been to never apologize, ignore any damage, and fight back. But people familiar with the matter said Trump’s team was aware that Puerto Rico’s comments were problematic.
The backlash from Puerto Rican celebrities and the chair of the Puerto Rican Republican Party on Tuesday was the swiftest ever, with the Trump campaign taking the unusual step of issuing a statement condemning the remarks after the rally to stem the bleeding.
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“This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or his campaign,” Daniel Alvarez, a senior Trump adviser, said in a statement.
Racist and crude comments were spread throughout the rally, starting with Tony Hinchcliffe, host of the Kill Tony podcast. “Right now, there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean, I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” Hinchcliffe said.
He also suggested that Latinos “love to have kids…they don’t back down.” They come into the country just like they do to our country. ”
Harris and Democrats seized the moment as an opportunity to highlight to voters the divisiveness of President Trump. Trump is “stoking the fuel of hatred and division, and that’s why people are tired of him,” Harris said, but her allies have already cut out the remarks in a TV ad. is being reduced.
Still, Mr. Trump’s team has privately expressed surprise at Mr. Trump’s ability to deflect controversy, and given the frenetic pace of the news cycle with less than a week to go until the November election, the Puerto Rico issue may also be quickly resolved. suggested that he would.
Some in the Trump campaign say the silver lining of the rally is that it has kept Harris out of the news and starved her (which they have long considered earned media, or free advertising). and suggested that the rally took place far enough away from the United States. An election day that may be forgotten.
