Donald Trump took the stage Sunday night at New York’s Madison Square Garden to deliver his campaign’s closing argument with the election nine days away after several of his allies used crude and racist insults toward Vice-President Kamala Harris and other critics of the former president.
The Republican nominee began by asking the same questions he’s asked at the start of every recent rally: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The crowd responded with a resounding “No!”
“This election is a choice between whether we’ll have four more years of gross incompetence and failure, or whether we’ll begin the greatest years in the history of our country,” he said after being introduced by his wife, Melania Trump, whose rare surprise appearance comes after she has been largely absent on the campaign trail.
Several speakers earlier on Sunday crudely insulted Harris, who is vying to become the first woman and Black woman to win the presidency.
Rudy Giuliani, the one-time New York City mayor and a former personal lawyer to Trump, falsely claimed that Harris was “on the side of the terrorists” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and wanted to bring Palestinians to the United States.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe used crass language in joking that Latinos “love making babies” and called the Caribbean U.S. territory of Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
Trump’s childhood friend, David Rem, referred to Harris as “the Antichrist” and “the devil.” Businessman Grant Cardone told the crowd that Harris “and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.”
And former Fox News host Tucker Carlson called Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, “a Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor.”
The event was a surreal spectacle, turning what his campaign had advertised as the event where he would deliver his closing message in the campaign’s final days to an illustration of what turns off his critics.
The lineup also included House Speaker Mike Johnson, TV psychologist Phil McGraw, former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan and someone who painted a picture of Trump hugging the Empire State Building.
And that was all before the Republican presidential nominee took the stage more than two hours late.
Hogan, returning to the venue where he performed years ago as a professional wrestler, seemed to reprise his character, emerging wearing a giant red, orange and yellow boa and violently waving a large American flag as he posed and danced. He spat on the stage during his speech, flexed his muscles repeatedly and told the audience: “Trump is the only man that can fix this country today.”
Trump on Sunday added a new proposal to his list of tax cuts aimed at winning over older adults and blue-collar workers, which already includes vows to end taxes on Social Security benefits, tips and overtime pay: a tax credit for family caregivers.
This comes after Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has talked about the “sandwich generation” of adults caring for aging parents while raising their children at the same time. She has proposed federal funding to cover home-care costs for older Americans.
Trump otherwise repeated familiar lines about foreign policy and immigration, calling for the death penalty for any migrant who kills a U.S. citizen and saying that the day he takes office, “The migrant invasion of our country ends.”