Former President Donald Trump said he has been the best president for Puerto Ricans during a roundtable discussion in suburban Philadelphia.
“No president has done more for Puerto Rico than I have,” Trump said at the event, which comes in the wake of a poorly received joke told at his weekend rally.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage” during Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, a remark that sparked controversy in the campaign’s final week.
Trump has claimed he didn’t hear the joke, distancing himself from it by saying he didn’t know who the comedian was.
“I don’t know him, someone put him up there,” Trump told ABC News. “I don’t know who he is.”
Trump’s campaign has said the comedian’s comments don’t reflect the views of the former president or the campaign but has not offered an apology for the comments.
The Harris campaign has widely denounced the remarks and said they’re emblematic of Trump’s thinking.
“The warm-up speakers were trotting out and peddling the most racist, sexist, bigoted stereotypes,” former President Barack Obama said Monday. “One guy called Puerto Rico ‘an island of garbage.’ These are fellow citizens he’s talking about. Here in Philadelphia, they are your neighbors. They are your friends. They are your co-workers. Their kids go to school with your kids.’”
Trump, in speaking about Puerto Rico at the roundtable, brought up his storm relief efforts in the territory while serving as president as evidence of his commitment.
“Well, we love it,” Trump said. “I know it very well, and we helped you through a lot of bad storms.”
Elsewhere at the event, Trump reiterated that he thinks illegal immigration is the top issue in the election rather than the economy, promising the biggest deportation operation in history even while saying he wasn’t looking forward to it.
“Hundreds of thousands of high-end criminals are released [into the United States], and she’s the border czar and she was put there by sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump said. “Then he went back to sleep, he said, ‘oh, now I’m in good shape.’”
Trump joked that he’d bring York Barbell manufacturing back to the U.S. via tariffs, a topic he’s grown increasingly fond of in the campaign’s final weeks.
He also took preemptive credit for the rising stock market, saying it’s coming in anticipation of him winning next week.
“[A Wall Street friend] said the only reason the stock market’s going up is because everybody on Wall Street thinks that Trump is going to win the election,” Trump said, drawing applause from the audience.
Trump said he supports right-to-try laws, which give terminally ill patients the chance to try drugs and treatments that haven’t received government approval yet.
“If somebody’s terminally ill, I want to give them a shot at life,” Trump said. “It’s a great feeling. At least, they can say, ‘Well, you know, I’ve got something, and maybe it’ll work, and maybe it won’t.’”
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Pennsylvania, where the event was held, is arguably the most important swing state of all, and its 19 electoral college votes make it the largest one.
Both campaigns have targeted the Keystone State in the last days of the election, and Trump is hoping to reassure the state’s Hispanic voters he’s on their side as they make their decision.