Former President Donald Trump was mocked for saying it was "an honor to be involved" in his Madison Square Garden Rally on Sunday, which he called an "absolute lovefest."
Two days after the large-scale rally that's been compared to one Adolf Hitler's Nazi followers held in 1939, Trump gathered both supporters and members of the press at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
The event drew criticism for a series of crude and racist remarks from various speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who controversially joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”
In response, the Trump campaign attempted to publicly distance itself from Hinchcliffe’s comment, though it remained silent on other offensive statements made during the event.
Despite multiple opportunities to address or apologize for the remarks, Trump projected and doubled down instead.
In his remarks he described the rally, saying that, “there’s never been an event so beautiful” as the one held in New York City:
"[Vice President Kamala Harris] is running a campaign on immoralization [sic] and really a campaign of destruction but perhaps more than anything else it's a campaign of hate. She's going around talking about Hitler and Nazis because her record's horrible."
"I don't think anybody's seen anything like what happened at Madison Square Garden. The love in that room. Politicians who've been doing this a long time said there's never been an event more beautiful."
"It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest. And it was my honor to be involved. And they started to say, 'Well, in 1939, the Nazis used Madison Square Garden. Can you imagine?"
"How terrible to say because they've used Madison Square Garden many times, many people have used it but nobody's ever had a crowd like that."
You can hear what he said in the video below.
Trump was swiftly called out.
Originally intended to showcase Trump's closing message, the Madison Square Garden event has instead become a distraction—and possibly a liability—especially given the importance of Puerto Rican voters in swing states like Pennsylvania.
Though Trump followed up with a rally in Allentown, a city with a significant Hispanic population, reactions were mixed, with many community members outraged over remarks from the previous rally that have been widely condemned as racist.
The fallout has placed the Trump campaign under higher scrutiny just as both campaigns are fighting hard for every vote. Speakers at the rally made racist remarks aimed at Latinos, Black people, Jews, and Palestinians, along with sexist jabs at Harris and Hillary Clinton.
In typical fashion, Trump distanced himself from Hinchcliffe, saying, “Someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is,” without condemning the offensive comments.
He brushed off the controversy, asserting that people were making the comedian’s appearance a “big deal” even though it “has nothing to do with the party, has nothing to do with us”—despite it being a core rally in his inflammatory campaign.
