The Trump campaign issued a rare statement distancing itself from a comedian’s offensive joke about Puerto Rico at his rally, a sign that it was concerned about losing crucial votes.
Donald Trump and his allies are full of bravado over his chances of victory in the closing days of the 2024 campaign. But there are signs, publicly and privately, that the former President and his team are worried that their opponents’ descriptions of him as a racist and a fascist may be breaking through to segments of voters.
That anxiety was clear after Trump’s six-hour event at Madison Square Garden in New York City, where the inflammatory speeches on Sunday included an opening act by a comedian known for a history of racist jokes who derided Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” and talked about Black people carving watermelons.
The backlash among Puerto Rican celebrities and performers was instantaneous across social media, prompting the Trump campaign to issue a rare defensive statement distancing themselves from offensive comments. In a tight race, any constituency could be decisive and the sizable Puerto Rican community in the battleground state of Pennsylvania was on the minds of Trump allies.
Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement that the Puerto Rico joke “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign”.
The Trump ethos has generally been to never apologise, never admit error and try to ignore controversy. Alvarez’s statement was a rare break from that practice, reflecting a new concern that Trump risks reminding undecided voters of the dark tenor of his political movement in the closing stage of the 2024 race.
Some of Trump’s Republican allies, seeming to harbour similar misgivings, were quick to criticise the joke and the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, who made it.
David Urban, an informal Trump adviser with long ties to Pennsylvania, where there are large numbers of Puerto Rican voters, posted on the social platform X: “I thought he was unfunny and unfortunately offended many of our friends from Puerto Rico,” adding the hashtag “#TrumpLovesPR”.
The pushback also came from officials in Florida, where Trump’s campaign is based and some of his advisers have spent their careers.
Senator Rick Scott of Florida posted on X on Sunday: “It’s not funny and it’s not true.” Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, of south Florida, condemned Hinchcliffe’s comments and said she was “disgusted,” adding that it did not reflect Republican values.
“Puerto Rico isn’t garbage, it’s home to fellow American citizens who have made tremendous contributions to our country,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida posted on X on Monday. But he also made a point to note that “those weren’t Trump’s words. They were jokes by an insult comic who offends”.
Beyond the rally backlash, Trump’s former chief of staff, retired four-star Marine general John Kelly, has brought new attention to Trump’s past remarks and behaviour. He described his former boss as a fascist and claimed that Trump made complimentary statements about Adolf Hitler.
At the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta on Monday night, Trump exaggerated and misstated the criticism, falsely claiming that Vice-President Kamala Harris had said that everyone who doesn’t vote for her is “a Nazi”. He talked about his father, Fred Trump, whose parents were German, and claimed his father had told him, “Never use the word Nazi. Never use that word,” and “Never use the word Hitler”.
Trump, who has accused President Joe Biden of running a “Gestapo administration,” a reference to Nazi Germany’s secret police, added, “I’m not a Nazi. I’m the opposite of a Nazi.” He told the rally crowd Monday, “She’s a fascist, OK? She’s a fascist.”
Asked to comment on appearing concerned that the attacks on Trump could sink in with voters, Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, did not address the question. Instead, she said, “Because of President Trump’s plans to cut taxes, end inflation, and stop the surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border, he has more support from the Hispanic American community than any Republican in recent history”.
Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, dismissed concerns. “Maybe it’s a stupid, racist joke, as you said,” he told reporters on Monday. “Maybe it’s not. I haven’t seen it.” But, he added, “we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America”.
Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who has specialised in mobilising Latino voters, asked publicly on Sunday for $30,000 in small donations to a PAC so he could send the video of the offensive comments to Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania.
By Monday morning, he had met the goal and had sent a blitz of 250,000 texts with 15 seconds of the comedian’s set disparaging the island.
“Puerto Ricans have a unique affinity for their homeland,” Rocha said. “When you attack the island, it cuts so deep with the community.”
Harris seized on the remarks, telling reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Monday morning that Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden offered fresh evidence of the former President’s divisiveness. Trump, she said, “fans the fuel of hate and division and that’s why people are exhausted with him”.
Harris, the Democratic nominee, is preparing to deliver a speech at the Ellipse near the White House that’s being cast as the closing argument of her three-month campaign, after she replaced President Joe Biden on the ticket. It is the same spot where Trump delivered a speech to his supporters on January 6, 2021, calling on Congress to reject Biden’s electoral college votes. Hundreds of those supporters then marched to the Capitol and violently disrupted the certification.
Trump’s current extended orbit is a mash-up of longtime political veterans, down-ballot elected officials and operatives who embrace the New Right view that the country is in an existential battle internally and that the ends justify their means for victory.
Most on the Trump team believe the attacks on Trump over the January 6 Capitol riot and the fighting over whether he is racist cover ground that is already known by an electorate that has become numb to Trump’s provocations and threats to weaponise government.
His advisers and close allies have marvelled privately that nothing has appeared to harm Trump so far politically, and it has given many a sense of invincibility about what he can get away with. And they think in a fragmented media environment in which non-traditional outlets have enormous sway, such headlines and stories matter less than they once did.
Some of them also view Sunday’s rally as a success, arguing that Trump’s filling an arena in deep-blue Manhattan offered a demonstration of his political strength to voters around the country.
But few of Trump’s own events contained the kind of overt racism and misogyny the Madison Square Garden rally did.
“She’s a fake – I’m not here to invalidate her – she’s a fake, a fraud, she’s a pretender,” Grant Cardone, a businessman and internet figure, told the crowd. “Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.”
And some of Trump’s own close allies privately expressed concern that the headlines about the event came at a problematic moment, when the small group of persuadable voters across the country is tuning in to the election, and that it was a needless risk when people are already casting ballots during early voting in many states.
There have been other moments suggesting the Trump team has concerns.
While Trump’s allies often publicly insist that voters have tuned out warnings about Trump’s authoritarianism, there were clear signs the Trump campaign was concerned about statements from Kelly. Trump and others who worked for him have denied the accusations.
The Trump team mobilised at full force to rebut Kelly – indicating they feared the attacks could appeal to the roughly 5% of voters they assess as undecided – in the lead-up to the Madison Square Garden rally.
After Harris called Trump a fascist, his campaign released a video featuring a Holocaust survivor, Jerry Wartski, who rejected comparisons of Trump to Hitler and demanded that Harris apologise. Wartski also attended Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, where several speakers tackled accusations about his character head on.
Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer and longtime friend, said from the stage that Trump respected all faiths and that “accusations of extremism, they couldn’t be further from the truth”.
Sid Rosenberg, a New York talk radio host, responded to Hillary Clinton likening Trump’s event to a pro-Hitler rally from 1939. Rosenberg joked that it was “out of character for me to speak at a Nazi rally, I was just in Israel”. He said that a vote for Trump was a vote for an administration “that cares about the Jewish people,” while calling Democrats “Jew-haters”. Hulk Hogan, more simply, looked at the crowd and said, “I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here”.
Trump himself also tried to signal his strength with diverse groups, citing that Jews, Muslims and Catholics alike were all lining up behind him. “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion,” he said.
Perhaps most striking was the joint statement issued days before the rally by House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, calling on Harris to stop calling Trump a fascist. It accused her of inflaming political tensions, ignoring Trump’s history of demonising his own opponents.
McConnell’s presence on that statement was especially notable.
Despite his endorsement of Trump months ago, McConnell told his biographer Michael Tackett that he hoped the former President “would pay a price” for his role in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol. According to Tackett’s biography, McConnell called Trump “erratic” and said that American voters chose wisely in voting him out of office. He also said he viewed Trump’s actions in connection with January 6 to be “as close to an impeachable offence as you can imagine,” though he did not vote to convict him in an impeachment trial and said the criminal justice system would be the place to address it.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Michael Gold
Photographs by: Kenny Holston, Hiroko Masuike and Dave Sanders
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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