Former President Trump refused to apologize on Tuesday for racist remarks about Puerto Rico made by a speaker at his Madison Square Garden campaign rally even as outcry continued to grow.
“The love in that room, it was breathtaking. There’s never been an event that beautiful,” Trump said about the MSG rally during a speech at his Florida resort. “It was a love fest. It was love for our country.”
Trump didn’t take questions from reporters at the gathering or refer specifically to the racist taunts unleashed by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe and others at the weekend rally.
“We’re gonna fight like hell for our country for the next seven days,” Trump said.
Trump rambled for more than an hour without mentioning the derisive “floating island of garbage” joke as well as other sneering remarks about Blacks and Latinos that were made at his rally, which was billed as a closing argument for his presidential campaign.
The Mar-a-Lago speech appeared to dismiss criticism from Puerto Rican leaders, including the chairman of Puerto Rico’s Republican Party and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Juan, who have called on Trump to personally apologize for the offensive jokes.
“Puerto Rico is not a floating island of garbage…You should not insult or denigrate the dignity & character of people,” Archbishop Roberto González Nieves said in a statement. “It’s not enough for the campaign to apologize, you should apologize yourself.”
Angel Cintrón, the GOP chair on the island, said he won’t support Trump unless he apologizes for the remark.
Mayor Adams declined on Tuesday to repeat his previous condemnation of the Puerto Rico jibe, and said critics should stop calling Trump a fascist.
“Everyone needs to turn down the rhetoric,” Adams said.
As controversy rages over the ugly rally, reports emerged that the Trump campaign ordered Hinchcliffe to not deliver a joke referring to Harris with the “c-word,” a crude term about the female anatomy.
That suggests that it tacitly or explicitly approved the “island of garbage” joke and other racist taunts about Latinos and Blacks that Hinchcliffe delivered.
It remains anyone’s guess as to how the controversy could affect the election, which polls say is a virtual dead heat with just a week to go before Election Day.
Trump hopes to significantly improve his performance among Latino and Black voters, especially men without a college degree, in the seven battleground states that will likely determine the winner.
Several of those states have disproportionately large Latino populations, where even a shift of a few thousand votes could determine the winner.
Pennsylvania in particular is considered the single most pivotal swing state by both parties. The Keystone State’s electorate is about 4% Latino, about half of whom are of Puerto Rican descent.
The Harris campaign rushed out an ad spotlighting the “island of garbage” comment along with Trump’s controversial stunt of tossing paper towels to a crowd as Puerto Rico grappled with the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017.
The vice president counters with her plan for Puerto Rico, which includes extending the child tax credit to Puerto Ricans on the island and more resources to rebuild the creaky power grid.