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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting) USA. USA. USA.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
On Sunday afternoon, to kick off the last full week of the 2024 presidential campaign, thousands of people lined up under a screen several stories high with the image of former President Donald Trump. They were waiting outside New York's Madison Square Garden, where Trump was holding a campaign rally. It was a homecoming of sorts for the man who's portrayed himself as the quintessential New Yorker.
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DONALD TRUMP: I'm thrilled to be back in the city I love. And thousands of proud, hardworking American patriots, you're with me. We're all...
SHAPIRO: The headliner took the stage two hours after he was scheduled to. And before that, more than two dozen others spoke. Many leaned into racist, misogynistic and vulgar rhetoric, like comedian Tony Hinchcliffe.
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TONY HINCHCLIFFE: I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it's called Puerto Rico.
SHAPIRO: There was intense backlash, and a Trump campaign adviser later put out a statement distancing the former president from Hinchcliffe's remarks. But Hinchcliffe wasn't the only speaker who used incendiary language during the rally Sunday night. Trump's childhood friend, David Rem, had this to say about Vice President Kamala Harris.
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DAVID REM: In fact, she is the devil, whoever screamed that out.
SHAPIRO: And Stephen Miller, a policy adviser in the Trump White House and current senior campaign adviser, underscored the former President's anti-immigrant message.
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STEPHEN MILLER: America is for Americans and Americans only.
SHAPIRO: Other speakers included Elon Musk, Hulk Hogan, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik and Phil McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil. Finally, more than four hours into the program, Trump took the stage and spoke for another 78 minutes, repeating many of the themes his warm-up acts had touched on.
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TRUMP: On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out.
We will get critical race theory and transgender insanity the hell out of our school.
Kamala Harris is a train wreck who has destroyed everything in her path. To make her president would be a gamble with the lives of millions and millions of people.
SHAPIRO: Well, NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben was at that rally last night, and she's with us now. Hi, Danielle.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Hey, Ari.
SHAPIRO: That joke about Puerto Rico, where the comedian called it a floating island of garbage, is getting the most backlash today. What's the response been?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, the fallout was immediate. Before the rally was even over, you had New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, who were doing an online event for the Harris campaign already. They played that clip and reacted with disgust as they heard it. Not only that, but pretty immediately, the Harris campaign itself quickly retweeted a clip.
But the backlash has not at all been only from Democrats. Republican politicians, including Florida Senator Rick Scott and Congressman Carlos Gimenez, posted on X last night, also criticizing that joke. And the Trump campaign, as you mentioned, got the message. In a statement late last night, the campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said, quote, "this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign."
SHAPIRO: That one line has gotten the most attention, but the rally as a whole has received a lot of criticism. You were there for those many hours. What stood out to you about it?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, a lot stood out. I mean, several speakers, as you said, again, made racist, misogynistic and just inflammatory remarks, which might even be putting it mildly. I mean, Hinchcliffe made a joke about football player Travis Kelce killing his girlfriend, Taylor Swift. Investor Grant Cardone was particularly crude in talking about Harris.
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GRANT CARDONE: She's a fake. I'm not here to invalidate her. She's a fake, a fraud. She's a pretender. Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.
KURTZLEBEN: And then conservative commentator Tucker Carlson insulted Kamala Harris' mixed-race heritage as well as her intelligence. Here he was.
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TUCKER CARLSON: It's going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, you know what? Kamala Harris - she just - she got 85 million votes because she's just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support.
KURTZLEBEN: And even beyond his insults, Carlson referenced the racist great replacement theory, saying in his speech that Democrats want to, quote, "replace Americans with" - as he put it - "people who would be reliable voters."
SHAPIRO: You have covered Trump's campaign all year. Do you expect it to be affected by any of this?
KURTZLEBEN: You know, what's been remarkable in this absolutely wild election year is that almost nothing has shifted the polls short of the Democrats swapping candidates. Besides that, it's been remarkably stable. Assassination attempts, Trump saying immigrants are vermin, are poisoning the blood of the nation, Trump's generals calling him fascist - nothing seems to budge anything. So in that light, I don't know if even this kind of a night is going to swing anything.
But as we keep saying, this is a close race. It'll be decided in a handful of states. So it doesn't take that big of a swing to have a decisive impact. But one really remarkable thing is that the Trump campaign is very clearly taking the response to this rally seriously in that they responded and said they don't agree with that joke about Puerto Ricans.
SHAPIRO: And why is that significant?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, because the campaign rarely disavows support, and they certainly don't backtrack on offensive rhetoric, at least very rarely do they. I mean, often when Trump's opponents criticize him, his supporters see that as a good thing. For example, ahead of last night's rally, opponents, including Hillary Clinton, compared this rally to a Nazi rally that was held at Madison Square Garden in 1939. So then last night, speakers joked about that. Here's Terry Bollea, who people might better know as Hulk Hogan.
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TERRY BOLLEA: I don't see no stinking Nazis in here. I don't see no stinking domestic terrorists in here.
KURTZLEBEN: I mean, think about all the things Trump doesn't back down from. A couple of weeks ago, he called Democrats the enemy from within and suggested he'd use the military on them. And, well, last night he doubled down on that once again, saying, yes, they are the enemy from within. So maybe in the next few days, he could turn down the temperature. But also, he has shown so clearly that that's not something he likes to do.
SHAPIRO: That's NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben. Thank you.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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