On Sunday, Donald Trump led a rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, which opened with a string of offensive and racially charged comments from his supporters. The program began with a comedian dismissing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” followed by other speakers making inappropriate jokes about Hispanic family sizes, watermelons, and Palestinians. This display highlighted the divisive rhetoric fueling the movement as the campaign enters its final weeks.
For decades, Trump, a New York celebrity, hoped to use the event at the iconic venue known for Knicks basketball games and Billy Joel concerts to deliver his closing argument against Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. He has long used the city as a foil before audiences in other states, painting a picture that bears little resemblance to reality. He often casts the place as crime-ridden, overrun by violent immigrant gangs.
The crowd gathered hours before the start of the show, a whole house of Trump supporters wearing red hats. They were mostly men, with a few women and young children sprinkled among them. Steven Reid, a 57-year-old from Virginia, said he was attending his seventh rally. He said the crowd in New York was “more diverse” than he’d seen at previous rallies, which he described as overwhelmingly white.
In recent days, Trump has been trying to court Hispanic voters as he works to cut into Democrats’ advantage with minority groups in battleground states. He has demonized migrants and called for the death penalty for gang members who kill police officers. But on Sunday, he was a guest at the rally of a comedian who mocked Puerto Ricans as a group and referred to Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris as a devil.
Harris, seeking to become the first Black woman president, was in Philadelphia earlier on Sunday, attempting to shore up support among Pennsylvania’s sizable Puerto Rican population. She visited a Puerto Rican restaurant, a church service, and a barbershop.
The Harris campaign criticized Trump’s rhetoric, saying it mirrors the baseless white-supremacist conspiracy theory that the government and “globalist elites” are plotting to replace White Americans with non-White immigrants. It also pointed to comments by a longtime adviser, John F. Kelly, who suggested that Hitler “did some good things.”
