Former President Donald Trump's final week within the race against Vice President Kamala Harris has been complicated by a series of controversial remarks and unforced errors that threaten to silence his closing argument to voters amid a barrage of Democratic attacks and legal backlash.
Throughout the week, Trump's campaign aired 1000’s of ads focused on his policy agenda: universal tariffs, deeper Tax cuts and widespread deportations of immigrants. But what drew essentially the most attention were a comedian's insults to Puerto Rico, Trump's violent rhetoric a few political opponent and a comment about women.
Last Sunday, the Republican presidential candidate kicked off his final week of campaigning with a energetic rally at New York's Madison Square Garden. The event was billed as an economics presentation to New Yorkers, but that message was drowned out by a circus of crude and sometimes downright racist remarks from among the opening speakers.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe's opening line sparked the loudest backlash after he called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.”
Hinchcliffe's comments sparked a wave of criticism from Puerto Rican celebrities comparable to musician Bad Bunny, in addition to elected officials and voters.
“It's not a good thing, I think people are pretty irritated,” Matt Tuerk, mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania, told NBC News on Tuesday. “Angry is a word I’ve heard from a few people.”
Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state with 19 electoral votes, has a major Puerto Rican population, adding to the political damage of Hinchcliffe's offensive comments.
Trump campaign staff spent the next hours and days of the MSG rally cleansing up and attempting to distance their candidate from the controversy.
“This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said last Sunday evening.
Democrats and the Harris campaign seized on the controversy.
“We saw what happened in New York City at Madison Square Garden as another attempt to divide us,” Harris' vp, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, said Thursday at an area campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “The disrespect shown to our fellow Puerto Ricans was not only unnecessary, it was incredibly hurtful.”
Trump's final message was also overshadowed by his verbal attacks on former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, certainly one of the Republican officials who has turn out to be a key surrogate for Harris within the campaign.
“She is a radical war hawk. Let’s put them there with a nine-barreled gun shooting at them,” Trump said Thursday at an event in Arizona with conservative media personality Tucker Carlson. “Okay, let’s see how she feels about it. You know when the guns are pointed at her face.”
On Friday, Arizona's attorney general announced that he was investigating whether Trump's violent comments qualified as a death threat and a violation of state law.
The Harris campaign turned Trump's comment right into a contrast to support his bipartisan support for the Democratic presidential nominee.
“You have Donald Trump talking about sending a prominent Republican to the firing squad, and you have Vice President Harris talking about sending one to her Cabinet,” Harris campaign adviser Ian Sams said Friday on MSNBC.
Trump's offhand comment about Cheney once more forced him and his campaign to spend the remaining days of the presidential campaign doing damage control.
“I’m just saying she was a crazy war hawk,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends” on Saturday. He added: “I said, 'Put a gun in her hand and let her go out and let her face the enemy with a gun in her hand.'”
Trump has branded his rambling rhetorical style, which usually undermines his core political message, as “the braid.”
“Look, I weave,” he said during a rally Saturday in Virginia. “No one else can control the weave as well as Trump.”
With polls showing a neck-and-neck presidential race in key swing states this past weekend, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson warned of a looming disparity.
“His message on air is, 'If you want the economy to get back on track and the world not to burn, then vote for me.' “That’s good news,” Anderson said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“Unfortunately, what he says on the stump is different for him than sometimes,” she said. “And I think that if he loses, the breakup will be a reason for that.”
On Wednesday, Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin that he would “protect” American women “whether women prefer it or not.” The comment gave the Harris campaign another opportunity to argue that Trump and Republicans more broadly are trying to impose their beliefs about women's lives over the objections of women themselves.
This argument is central to the Democratic Party's opposition to abortion restrictions imposed in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision – an issue that polls show is driving massive support for Harris among women.
Former Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod said on CNN Sunday that he is closely watching how the race comes to an end and that Harris is “ending well.”
“She’s on an embassy. She was very disciplined. Trump doesn’t, and I think that’s significant.”
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