Puerto Ricans weren’t the only targets at Donald Trump’s Sunday night event at Madison Square Garden, but they’re the ones causing the former president the biggest political headache in the final week of the 2024 race.
The Republican held an event where the audience heard a warm-up speaker refer to Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage,” among other derogatory remarks about Latinos that were peddled at the gathering. The backlash has been fierce, causing unease among party officials.
The chairman of the GOP in Puerto Rico announced he’d withhold support for Trump unless the former president apologized for Sunday’s racism. At least for now, that’s not going to happen.
For Trump, Step One was holding a hate-filled event. Step Two was ignoring the controversy the day after it erupted. Step Three involved pretending that he hadn’t headlined a hate-filled event, telling the public that he considered it a “lovefest.”
When these efforts didn’t appear to help, the former president moved on to a dubious Step Four. The New York Times reported:
In a moment that seemed highly choreographed — given the fallout from a comedian’s offensive joke about Puerto Ricans at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally — a Puerto Rican woman [at a roundtable event held in Drexel Hill, Pa.] tells Trump that Puerto Ricans stand behind him. Trump thanks her and claims, implausibly, that no president has done more for Puerto Rico than he did.
In fact, the Republican spent much of the day declaring, “I think no president’s done more for Puerto Rico than I have.”
This wasn’t just ridiculous, it also created an opportunity to highlight his awful his record toward the island. A separate Times report noted, for example, “As president, Mr. Trump fought bitterly with [Carmen Yulín Cruz, the former San Juan mayor] and other Puerto Rican leaders, and resisted sending billions of dollars in aid after the territory was ravaged by back-to-back hurricanes in 2017. He made angry comments on social media and tossed paper towels at Puerto Ricans during a visit that few, if any, have forgotten. He even wondered privately if the United States could sell the island.”
The report added that the Republican Party’s platform “no longer mentions statehood for Puerto Rico, a position the party had held before Mr. Trump’s relationship with the island soured.”
All of which helped set the stage for Step Five: feigning ignorance and pretending the controversy isn’t real.
Sitting down for his latest interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Trump said of Tony Hinchcliffe, “I have no idea who he is,” and adding that “they” were responsible for giving him a speaking slot. “What they’ve done is taken somebody who has nothing to do with the party, has nothing to do with us, said something, and they try and make a big deal,” Trump went on to tell Hannity. “But I don’t know who it is, I don’t even know who put him in. And I can’t imagine it’s a big deal.” If that sounds to you like wishful thinking, we’re on the same page. It would’ve been easy for the Republican candidate to denounce the racist rhetoric at his own event on Sunday. Trump also had the option of expressing regret and/or taking some responsibility for the depraved rhetoric at his own rally. He’s chosen a different, more Trumpian path.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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