Trump says his New York rally, marked by crude and racist insults, 'was like a lovefest'

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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 and Republican candidate 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 said “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.”

Harris’ campaign and Trump’s critics have seized on the event, which began with a preshow that included speakers who made racist comments targeting Latinos, including Puerto Ricans, as well as 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.

Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s set, in which he joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage,” has stirred particular anger given the electoral importance of Puerto Ricans who live in Pennsylvania and other key swing states. The comments were condemned by some of Trump's top Republican allies. His campaign took the rare step of publicly distancing itself from Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico but not other comments.

With just a week before Election Day, some Trump allies have voiced alarm that the rally, which was supposed to emphasize his closing message in grand New York fashion, has instead served as a distraction, highlighting voters’ concerns about Trump's rhetoric and penchant for controversy in the race’s closing stretch.

On Tuesday, Trump summoned reporters to Mar-a-Lago, where he tried to 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 has painted a dark and disturbing picture of life in America since he left office — featured several speakers who shared painful stories, including Tammy Nobles, whose daughter was allegedly killed by gang members living in the country illegally.

He also announced that, if he wins, he will seize the assets of criminal gangs and drug cartels and use those assets “to create a compensation fund to provide restitution for the victims of migrant crime.”

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."

He did not address what the other speakers at his rally said, but noted that Democrats had pointed to a Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden in 1939, when more than 20,000 people attended an event organized by the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi group that hung swastikas alongside a huge portrait of George Washington.

Several of the speakers on Sunday referenced that event, including former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, who said, “I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here.”

In an interview with ABC News Tuesday, 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.

The comments have drawn outrage from Puerto Rican leaders with just a week to go before the election.

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 was to campaign later Tuesday in Pennsylvania, a state where the Latino eligible voter population has nearly tripled 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 was to hold a rally in Allentown, which has a large Hispanic population, on Tuesday night, giving him an opportunity to speaks directly to voters who may have been offended.

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.

Trump “didn’t make the comment about Puerto Rico. The comedian made the comment about Puerto Rico. But it is his political forum.”

The Harris campaign has released an ad that will run online in battleground states targeting Puerto Rican voters and highlighting the comedian’s remarks.

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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.