What happened
Kamala Harris kicked off the weekend discussing reproductive rights before a crowd of 30,000 in Houston and Donald Trump capped it with a rally Sunday night before a capacity crowd of nearly 20,000 fans in New York’s Madison Square Garden. With eight days to go, the race is essentially tied nationally and in the battleground states, where the two candidates spent the bulk of the weekend.
Who said what
Trump’s 78-minute speech in Manhattan was billed as the “closing message of his campaign,” The New York Times said, but by the time he spoke, two hours later than scheduled, it “had instead become a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.” The rally opened with comedian Tony Hinchcliffe joking that Latinos “love making babies,” with a crude line about not using birth control, and another calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
Hinchcliffe also mocked Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers and joked about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween, but it was his digs at Puerto Ricans — a sizable voting bloc in Pennsylvania — that got swift and bipartisan blowback. Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny posted both Hinchcliffe’s jokes and Harris’ outreach to Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia earlier in the day, throwing his support behind the Democratic candidate. Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony posted similar comments to their large social media followings.
The Trump rally versus Harris outreach was a “split screen the Harris campaign welcomed,” Adam Wren said at Politico. “If Donald Trump loses on Nov. 5, the racist carnival he curated at Madison Square Garden could be remembered as the day that cost him this margin-of-error election.”
Even the “normally pugnacious Trump campaign took the rare step of distancing itself from Hinchcliffe,” The Associated Press said, saying his Puerto Rican joke “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” But “other speakers also made incendiary comments,” including a Trump childhood friend calling Harris “the Antichrist” and “the devil,” and a businessman suggesting she was a prostitute with “pimp handlers.”
What next?
Both parties “saw the night as a win,” Shelby Talcott said at Semafor. Republicans pointed to the huge media coverage for Trump’s message on immigration and the economy in the packed “iconic venue” in a blue state, while Democrats highlighted the dark vitriol and “crude and offensive” insults to key blocs of voters.