The United States presidential candidate Donald Trump is facing more blowback from a controversial Madison Square Garden rally marred by sexist and racist insults, by calling it a “beautiful” event and “an absolute lovefest”.
Trump made the comments during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Tuesday, saying the rally in which a headline comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” was an unprecedented display of affection.
Despite a firestorm of outrage on social media from Democrats and a host of Puerto Rican celebrities, as well as some leading Republicans, Trump made no apology for the racist comments by Hinchcliffe and others.
Instead, he brushed off the critics who compared it to a 1939 Nazi event at the arena.
“There was love in the room. The love in that room was breathtaking,” Trump said.
“Politicians that have been doing this for a long time – 30 and 40 years – said there’s never been an event so beautiful,” he added.
“It was like a love fest, an absolute love fest, and it was my honour to be involved”.
It was not full of love, except for him. There was a lot of love for Donald Trump there,” quipped CNN’s political reporter, Dana Bash.
The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump political action committee, was quick to slam Trump’s characterisation of the event and called on voters to end his election hopes.
“No explanation, no apology,” the group wrote on X. “He’s trash, throw him away in the dustbin of history in 7 days.”
Trump’s comments were reminiscent of other notorious events which he has sought to describe in positive terms. When hundreds of pro-Trump rioters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, injuring policemen in the process, Trump called it a “day of love.”
Trump’s New York rally on Monday involved some 30 speakers dishing out multiple insults aimed at Black people, Latinos and Democrats. One speaker described Vice President Kamala Harris as “the devil” and “the antichrist,” while former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked Harris’s biracial heritage.
But the fiercest backlash came from Americans of Puerto Rican descent, some 500,000 of whom live in the key swing state of Pennsylvania.
Right now, we have no business and no relationship with Trump,” Angel M Cintron, the Republican party’s chair in Puerto Rico, said during a Monday talk show.
“If Donald Trump doesn’t apologise, we won’t vote for him.”
The popular Puerto Rican singer, Bad Bunny, released an eight-minute tribute video to his homeland on Tuesday. Touching on the controversy, he captioned it simply “garbage” on his Instagram page which has more than 45 million followers.
The rally also prompted a harsh editorial in the island’s leading newspaper, El Nuevo Dia, which called on Puerto Ricans who can vote in the United States to support Democrat Kamala Harris.
“Politics is not a joke and hiding behind a comedian is cowardly,” wrote the paper’s editor, Maria Luisa Ferre Rangel, in the editorial that appeared on Tuesday’s front page and the website.
But not all Puerto Ricans were offended. Trump was set to hold a rally later Tuesday in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a city with a large Hispanic population, where Puerto Rico’s shadow US senator, Zoraida Buxo, will join him, AP reported.