2024 Elections

Trump touts his Madison Square Garden rally in Allentown.

“We had a ball,” Donald Trump said Tuesday in Allentown, Pennsylvania, of the Sunday rally, which packed Madison Square Garden to capacity. “That was the greatest evening anyone’s seen, politically.” | Francis Chung/POLITICO

By Natalie Allison

10/29/2024 10:45 PM EDT

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ALLENTOWN, Pennsylvania — Forty-eight hours after a racist opening act at his rally eclipsed coverage of anything else Donald Trump would do for days, the former president had a golden opportunity for clean-up duty.

But he passed.

Trump was already scheduled to hold a rally in Allentown, a majority-Latino city home to one of the country’s largest clusters of Puerto Ricans — and a battleground area within the holy grail swing state of Pennsylvania.

And here, Trump didn’t express regret or distance himself from offensive comments about Puerto Rico made by a comedian at his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday. Instead, the former president described the rally as a success, even as the controversy surrounding it has overshadowed the start of his final week on the campaign trail.

“We had a ball,” Trump said of the Sunday rally, which packed the arena to capacity after his supporters lined up for hours. “That was the greatest evening anyone’s seen, politically.”

And he touted his standing with Latino voters, saying he is “setting every record with Hispanics, Latinos,” that “nobody loves the Hispanic community and Puerto Rico community like I do,” and that he had “done more for Puerto Rico than any president, by far.”

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who also briefly spoke in Spanish, said that he knew that Spanish-language media were covering the event and did not outright mention the controversy stemming from Trump’s Sunday rally. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

But the team around him, at least, sought to mitigate the damage without Trump himself getting involved. As Puerto Rico’s largest newspaper issued an endorsement for Harris Tuesday night, Trump’s campaign sent out several Latino surrogates to speak before he took the stage — most notably, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who also briefly........

© Politico