Donald Trump accused Kamala Harris of running a campaign of hate at his Mar-a-Lago club in a display of projection days after his rally in New York became embroiled by racist and crude comments that aides worried might have broken through to voters in the final days of the presidential race.
The event was open to reporters but Trump took no questions – he would have almost certainly been asked about the caustic rally rhetoric – and in an attempt to change the narrative, argued Harris was stoking division.
It was also an attempt to pre-empt what could be a damaging day for the Trump campaign. Later on Tuesday, Harris will speak at a rally on the Ellipse in Washington – the same site as Trump’s rally just before the January 6 Capitol attack – to tie him directly to the riot.
“Really a campaign of destruction but really, perhaps more than anything else, a campaign of hate – it’s a campaign of hate,” Trump said referring to Harris. “I said yesterday she’s a vessel, it’s a very big powerful party with smart people but it’s vicious and perhaps even trying to destroy our country.
“Because who would want open borders where millions of people can flow in from prisons and from gangs – the worst gang members anywhere in the world – who would want this for our country?” Trump said.
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Trump also pointedly took umbrage at opponents comparing his rally to a Nazi rally. “It was love in the room,” Trump said, shaking his head.
But the lack of questions meant Trump was not challenged about the comments made by the first speaker at his six-hour rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, who described Puerto Rico as a floating island of garbage and spoke of Black people carving watermelons.
Trump will make an attempt to clean up any damage later in the day when he travels to the must-win state of Pennsylvania for a rally in Allentown, which has a large population of Puerto Rican immigrants and their descendants, a constituency the campaign cannot afford to alienate.
The Trump campaign’s operating procedure for years has been to never apologize, ignore any damage and counterattack. But Trump’s team has recognized that the Puerto Rico comments have become a problem, several people familiar with the matter said.
The backlash from Puerto Rican celebrities and, on Tuesday, the island’s Republican party chair has been as swift as it has been severe, prompting the Trump campaign to take the rare step of issuing a statement condemning the remarks after the rally to stop the bleed.
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“This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” a senior Trump adviser, Danielle Alvarez, said in a statement.
The racist and crude comments pervaded the rally but started with the first speaker, Tony Hinchcliffe, the host of the Kill Tony podcast. “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” Hinchcliffe said.
He also suggested that Latinos “love making babies … There’s no pulling out. They come inside, just like they do to our country.”
Harris and Democrats have seized on the moment as gift-wrapped opportunity to underscore Trump’s divisiveness to voters. Trump “fans the fuel of hate and division and that’s why people are exhausted with him”, Harris said, while Harris-allied groups have already cut television ads clipping the remarks.
Still, Trump’s team have privately expressed amazement at his ability to deflect controversy and suggested that the Puerto Rico problem will also blow over quickly, given the frenetic pace of the news cycle with less than a week until the November election.
Some on Trump’s team also suggested the silver lining of the rally was that it kept Harris out of the news and is starving her of oxygen – which they have long seen as earned media, or free advertising – and that it occurred just far enough away from election day that it might be forgotten.
