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3 weeks ago
There was racism and misogyny by the bucketload. There was a firing squad death threat to a former congresswoman. And there was the extraordinary sight of a Republican candidate for president of the United States playing dress-up as a sanitation worker in the cab of a garbage truck.
Donald Trump’s final full week on the campaign trail was as unedifying as it was bizarre.
With his vitriolic rants and threats of violent revenge against political enemies increasing in intensity, it was hard to set aside Democratic rival Kamala Harris’s closing argument that the former president is “unstable and unhinged”.
The former president’s extremist promise to unleash the military against those he considers “the enemy within” – he named leading Democrats including ex-speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressman Adam Schiff among them – was unprecedented.
And yet it was swiftly eclipsed by this week’s other developments.
It will be up to voters next week to decide whether any of it ultimately matters, at least in terms of who occupies the White House for the next four years. But history will record the waning days of the 2024 presidential campaign to be like no previous election, with one candidate leaning so heavily into an agenda of hate and menace, and his acolytes attempting variously to deny, distract from or clean up his remarks.
The carousel began spinning on Sunday when Trump hosted a symbolic rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where 85 years earlier American Nazis wearing swastikas had gathered months ahead of the outbreak of the second world war. Before Trump even took the stage there was controversy when a comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, delivered a line that was to become the dominant theme of the following days.
“There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” he said, failing to elicit laughs from an audience of 20,000.
The backlash was immediate and ferocious. Republicans joined Democrats in condemning the racist “joke”, while Trump embarked on a mission to try to turn the situation to his advantage.
There was no apology, of course. Though, at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, Trump insisted “nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rican community more than I do”, and that the Madison Square Garden event, notable for its deluge of anger, profanity and racism directed at immigrants and Democrats by a succession of speakers, was “a love fest”, and that “the love was unbelievable”.
Pennsylvania’s 472,000 Puerto Ricans, many of whom recall Trump withholding disaster relief funds and patronizingly tossing paper towels at desperate citizens after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, saw it differently.
“This is not the first time that our Puerto Rican community feels disrespected,” Philadelphia voter Yemele Ayala, told the Guardian. “We’re not taking that lightly.”
Joe Biden became caught in the maelstrom the same day when a comment he made about “garbage” was construed by the Trump camp as an attack on their candidate’s supporters. What the president intended to say was still under scrutiny on Friday as it emerged the White House had altered the official transcript of his remarks.
But the episode also gave rise to the stunt that would provide the defining image of the week, and probably its most ludicrous: Trump in a DayGlo safety vest, demanding of reporters, “Do you like my garbage truck?” before the vehicle emblazoned with his campaign logo was driven in circles around a Wisconsin parking lot in an apparent attempt to show it would be its passenger “taking out the trash” on 5 November, and not his Democratic opponent.
Other examples of Trump’s bitter disdain for those who stand up to him, as well as his flagrant misogyny, came to the fore as the week wore on.
In Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Wednesday night, addressing reproductive rights, he attempted to portray himself as a “protector” of women, despite dozens of claims of sexual assault against him, and a judge’s ruling adjudicating him a rapist.
“Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them,” he said, drawing an instant rebuke from Harris.
The vice-president, meanwhile, became Trump’s target in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the rightwing extremist and disgraced former Fox News host, in Glendale, Arizona, on Thursday night. Harris, he insisted, was “a low-IQ individual”, and “dumb as a rock”, as he repeated previous slurs against his opponent.
The biggest talking point from the Carlson interview, however, was Trump declaring Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney a “radical war hawk” and saying he would like to see multiple guns pointed at her.
“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said of a politician who has campaigned with and for Harris. Arizona’s Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes said on Friday she was investigating the comments to see if they amounted to a death threat.
In response to Trump, Cheney warned the public of the dangers of a dictatorship and said he “wants to be a tyrant”. Not for the first time this week, his representatives spent much of the day Friday insisting to the media that Trump’s meaning was different from what he said.
Trump’s post to his Truth Social network later in the day repeated the same criticisms of Cheney but, conspicuously, omitted any reference to weapons being pointed at her.
Harris will make her own closing pitches over the weekend, but left no doubt about her position on Trump’s behavior as she addressed reporters in Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday afternoon.
“Anyone who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly disqualified and unqualified to be president,” she said.
“Donald Trump is someone who considers his political opponents the enemy, is permanently out for revenge, and is increasingly unstable and unhinged.”
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