Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) lodged several accusations at the Donald Trump’s campaign following his controversial Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday.
The congresswoman, and New York City native, slammed the event as a “hate rally” during a Monday morning appearance on MSNBC.
“These are mini Jan. 6 rallies. These are mini ‘stop the steal rallies,’“ she told the network. “These are rallies to prime an electorate into rejecting the results of an election if it doesn’t go the way that they want.”
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The Sunday rally platformed a plethora of racist and factually inaccurate claims beginning with comedian Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.” Another speaker accused Kamala Harris of being managed by “pimp handlers,” and former Trump aide Stephen Miller told the crowd “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
The former president and the “entire cadre of people” on the rally stage, Ocasio-Cortez said, have “no respect” for the “law of the United States of America”
“They either want to win this election or they are using rhetoric of taking it by force,” she continued, pointing to the Trump campaign’s “unhinged” messaging on “inciting violence and hatred” towards Latinos, Black Americans, and Americans without children.
“The only reason the rhetoric has gotten this far is precisely because they are trying to prime the kind of froth that led up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol,” she added.
While Trump’s campaign attempted to distance itself from some of the inflammatory comments made by specifically by Hinchcliffe, saying in a statement after the event that his remarks do not “reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed “they knew exactly who was going to say what before they went on.”
She attributed the campaign’s backtracking to an attempt to quell concerns among the “tens of thousands” of Puerto Rican voters living in battleground states.
“They’re realizing they might have made a big error saying out loud what they were thinking,” she said.
