Trump Team Fears Damage From Racist Rally Remarks
(These were Trump’s hand picked racist speakers speaking a message that i have heard trumpet since the early 1970’s when he and his father were sued for racism in renting apartments to Blacks and Puerto Ricans. Trump and his speakers are savages, plain and simple)
“The Trump campaign issued a rare statement distancing itself from a comedian’s offensive joke about Puerto Rico at his rally on Sunday, a sign that it was concerned about losing crucial votes.
Donald J. 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 Mr. 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 apologize, never admit error and try to ignore controversy. Ms. Alvarez’s statement was a rare break from that practice, reflecting a new concern that Mr. Trump risks reminding undecided voters of the dark tenor of his political movement in the closing stage of the 2024 race.
Some of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies, seeming to harbor similar misgivings, were quick to criticize 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 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, the retired four-star Marine general John F. Kelly, has brought new attention to Mr. Trump’s past remarks and behavior. He described his former boss as a fascist and claimed that Mr. Trump made complimentary statements about Adolf Hitler.
At the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta on Monday night, Mr. 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.”
Mr. Trump, who has accused President 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 on Monday, “She’s a fascist, OK? She’s a fascist.”
Asked to comment on appearing concerned that the attacks on Mr. Trump could sink in with voters, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, did not address the question. Instead, she said, “Due to 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, Mr. Trump’s running mate, dismissed any 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 specialized in mobilizing 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,” Mr. Rocha said. “When you attack the island, it cuts so deep with the community.”
Ms. Harris seized on the remarks, telling reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Monday morning that Mr. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden offered fresh evidence of the former president’s divisiveness. Mr. Trump, she said, “fans the fuel of hate and division and that’s why people are exhausted with him.”
Ms. 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 Biden on the ticket. It is the same spot where Mr. Trump delivered a speech to his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, calling on Congress to reject President Biden’s electoral college votes. Hundreds of those supporters then marched to the Capitol and violently disrupted the certification.
Mr. 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 Mr. Trump over the Jan. 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 Mr. Trump’s provocations and threats to weaponize government.
His advisers and close allies have marveled privately that nothing has appeared to harm Mr. 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 nontraditional 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 Mr. Trump’s filling an arena in deep blue Manhattan offered a demonstration of his political strength to voters around the country.
But few of Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Trump’s allies often publicly insist that voters have tuned out warnings about Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism, there were clear signs the Trump campaign was concerned about the statements from Mr. Kelly. Mr. Trump and others who worked for him have denied Mr. Kelly’s accusations.
The Trump team mobilized at full force to rebut Mr. Kelly — indicating they feared the attacks could appeal to the roughly five percent of voters they assess as undecided — in the lead-up to the Madison Square Garden rally.
After Ms. Harris called Mr. Trump a fascist, his campaign released a video featuring a Holocaust survivor, Jerry Wartski, who rejected comparisons of Mr. Trump to Hitler and demanded that Ms. Harris apologize. Mr. Wartski also attended Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Trump’s event to a pro-Hitler rally from 1939. Mr. 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 Mr. 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.”
Mr. 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 Ms. Harris to stop calling Mr. Trump a fascist. It accused her of inflaming political tensions, ignoring Mr. Trump’s history of demonizing his own opponents.
Mr. McConnell’s presence on that statement was especially notable.
Despite his endorsement of Mr. Trump months ago, Mr. McConnell told his biographer Michael Tackett that he hoped the former president “would pay a price” for his role in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. According to Mr. Tackett’s biography, Mr. McConnell called Mr. Trump “erratic” and said that American voters chose wisely in voting him out of office. He also said he viewed Mr. Trump’s actions in connection with Jan. 6 to be “as close to an impeachable offense 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.
Shane Goldmacher contributed reporting.
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan
Michael Gold is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections.More about Michael Gold“
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