President Trump is doubling down on his support for the “love fest” rally he held at Madison Square Garden on Sunday where speakers made crass jokes about Puerto Ricans, Jews, Latinos, Palestinians, Blacks, and women. The former president also seemed to imply that his rally was bigger than the 1939 rally held by fascists at the same venue. 

Speaking to a crowd at his Mar a Lago estate on Tuesday morning, Trump described the Madison Square Garden event as a “love fest” the likes of which the country has never seen. 

“I don’t think anybody has ever seen anything like what happened the other night at Madison Square Garden — the love in that room, it was breathtaking and you could’ve filled it many, many times [over] with the people that weren’t able to get in,” Trump said. “There’s never been an event so beautiful. It was like a love fest, an absolute love fest.”

When Trump first announced the rally in early October, the New York state senator who represents the Garden likened Trump’s event to a 1939 rally by the American Nazi Party that was held at the same venue, and The New York Sun reported that Apple’s digital assistant Siri was directing users who searched for information about the Trump rally to the wikipedia page of that same Nazi rally. 

That comparison seems to have gotten to the former president, and he suggested on Tuesday that his rally was larger and far more impressive than the rally held on the eve of World War II.  “They started to say, ‘well, in 1939 the Nazis used Madison Square Garden!’” Trump said. “How terrible to say … Many people have used it, but nobody has ever had a crowd like [mine].”

The Republican vice presidential nominee, Senator Vance, seemingly tried to distance himself on Monday from the incident where comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

“I haven’t seen the joke. Maybe it’s a stupid racist joke … maybe it’s not. I haven’t seen it,” the senator said on Monday.  By Tuesday, the senator was echoing his running mate’s assertion that the rally was nothing short of a “love fest.”

“Just two days ago we had this incredible rally — over 100,000 people at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It was an incredible thing,” Mr. Vance said Tuesday, even though the venue only holds fewer than 20,000. “We had patriots from all over the country showing up, speaking, volunteering, and of course, we had over 100,000 New Yorkers who showed up for the rally itself.”

The Garden rally was quickly derailed Sunday when a number of racist remarks were made not only about Puerto Rico, but about Latinos and their sexual proclivities, Black people and watermelons, and Jews and money. 

The Trump campaign tried to distance itself, saying the jokes did not “reflect” their views or the former president’s views, though they have so far declined to apologize to anyone for allowing the prepared remarks to go into the teleprompter and be delivered to the thousands assembled inside and the millions watching around the country. 

Vice President Harris is already leaping on the comments made by Mr. Hinchcliffe, cutting them into a digital ad aimed at Puerto Rican communities. Across several swing states, there are hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican voters who could help determine the outcome of this election, including nearly half a million who live in Pennsylvania. 

The former president will rally at Allentown, Pennsylvania on Tuesday night, which has a large Puerto Rican population. Local activist groups say they plan to protest the event. How much the controversy will hurt Trump’s campaign, though, is unclear. 

“In 2016, Donald J. Trump became the Republican nominee and ultimately won the presidency after calling many Mexican immigrants rapists and falsely claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States,” the New York Times reminded its readers earlier this month.

“Eight years later, the polls suggest that he might well return to the White House by faring better among Black and Hispanic voters combined than any Republican presidential nominee since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964,” the Times reported in a story by Nate Cohn.