With Election Day only a week away, the Trump campaign is facing a self-inflicted crisis after speakers at Sunday’s mega-MAGA rally at Madison Square Garden made a number of racist, obscene, and derogatory remarks during what was supposed to be a showcase for Donald Trump’s big closing argument to voters. At his press conference on Tuesday morning, Donald Trump did not try to clean up the mess, instead bringing out guests whose stories embodied his platforms. Below are the key moments from the press conference in which Trump took no questions from the press.
“How terrible to say,” Trump said, of the comparisons to the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. “Nobody has ever had love like that. There was love in the room. It was love for our country.” Trump did not mention the joke by Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” He then walked off to “YMCA” by the Village People.
The former president explained how he would replace staffers in federal agencies with his own people, referring back to the Department of Veterans Affairs and how he put supporters into its ranks, replacing the “sadists” who were staffing the department. (While president, Trump had three of his friends from Mar-a-Lago secretly running the VA and they tried to sell access to vets’ medical records.)
In a tangent about his unusual plan to revive tariffs to reduce taxes, Trump said that the European Union was designed to “take advantage of the United States,” adding that European countries will bring back manufacturing to the United States “when they’re told that they’re going to have to pay a tarriff of 25 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent.”
Trump says the U.S. is nearly ‘third-world status’ and brings out the family of a soldier killed in the Afghanistan withdrawal
After a rambling introduction on the state of the economy and President Biden’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump brought out the mother-in-law of Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, who was killed at the Kabul airport bombing in August 2021. She applauded Trump for his diplomatic pressure on the Taliban while he was president.
“Nobody mentions the arms, the legs gone, the face just obliterated,” Trump said, once he took back the microphone, referring to veterans disfigured in the war.
To get a firsthand account of how inflation under President Biden has impacted small business owners, Trump brought out a man who owns a dry cleaning business in south Florida who claimed that the industry is underwater due to rising costs. He said that the country needs to “effect change.”
“We really helped a lot of people during the prime time of the China virus,” Trump said, once he took back the microphone.
Repeating his claims that the Biden administration is letting in scores of criminals from Central and South America, Trump said that it is safe to walk the streets of the Venezuelan capital because the Biden administration has let them into the United States. He then played a video of a mother who told the story of her 12-year-old daughter who was killed by two undocumented migrants from Venezeula.
He then brought out the mother of a 20-year-old woman with autism who was killed by an El Salvadoran migrant. Trump has brought out mothers of Americans killed by migrants on the campaign trail several times.
Trump then said that, as president, he would seize the assets of any criminal migrant gangs and provide a restitution fund for families such as those he highlighted on Tuesday.
In his opening statement after the Madison Square Garden rally — an hour and 20 minutes behind schedule — Donald Trump said that Kamala Harris is “perhaps trying to destroy our country” and claimed that she was running a “campaign of hate.”
As is common in the last weeks of the campaign, the former president isn’t on time for the speech at his house in south Florida. By 11:15 a.m., he still hadn’t gone on, forcing listeners in the room and at home to listen to the Beach Boys and Foreigner and Donna Summer as they await his appearance.
In a brief interview with ABC News on Tuesday morning, Donald Trump said that he was not familiar with the comedian who insulted Puerto Ricans when he called the territory a “floating island of garbage.”
“I don’t know him, someone put him up there,” Trump said. “I don’t know who he is.”
On Monday, the VP candidate tried to to blow off of the controversy, insisting that he hadn’t seen the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke, but whether it was racist or not, the real story was how Kamala Harris was talking about that instead of her pitch to voters.
