Donald Trump accused Kamala Harris of waging a hate campaign at his Mar-a-Lago club, days after his rally in New York was hit by racist and crude remarks that aides feared would reach voters in the finale days of the presidential race had penetrated.

The event was open to reporters, but Trump did not answer questions — he would almost certainly have been asked about the vitriolic rally rhetoric — and, in an attempt to change the narrative, argued that Kamala Harris was stoking division.

It was also an attempt to forestall a potentially damaging day for the Trump campaign. Later Tuesday, Harris will speak at a rally on the Ellipse in Washington – the same site as Trump's rally shortly before the attack on the Capitol on January 6 – to directly link him to the insurrection.

“Truly a campaign of destruction, but really, perhaps more than anything else, a campaign of hate — it is a campaign of hate,” Trump said, referring to Harris. “I said yesterday, it is a ship, it is a very large, powerful party with smart people, but it is evil and may even be trying to destroy our country.

“Because who would want open borders that allow millions of people from prisons and from gangs – the worst gang members in the world – to flow in – who would want that for our country?” Trump said. “Who would want transgender surgeries everywhere?” he added tangentially.

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Trump also clearly expressed outrage at opponents who compared his rally to a Nazi rally. “There was love in the room,” Trump said, shaking his head.

But the lack of questions meant Trump did not challenge comments made by the first speaker at his six-hour rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden, who described Puerto Rico as a floating island of trash and spoke of black people carving watermelons.

Trump will try to undo any damage later in the day when he travels to the must-win state of Pennsylvania, home to a large population of Puerto Rican immigrants and their descendants, for a rally in Allentown, a constituency the campaign cannot afford alienate.

The Trump campaign's modus operandi for years has been to never apologize, ignore harm and counterattack. But Trump's team recognized that the comments from Puerto Rico had become a problem, several people familiar with the matter said.

The backlash from Puerto Rican celebrities and, on Tuesday, the island's Republican Party chairman was as swift as it was fierce, prompting the Trump campaign to take the rare step of issuing a statement after the rally condemning the remarks in an attempt to stop the bleeding .

“This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” a senior Trump adviser, Danielle Alvarez, said in a statement.

The racist and crude comments permeated the rally but began with the first speaker, Tony Hinchcliffe, host of the Kill Tony podcast. “Right now there is literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” Hinchcliffe said.

He also suggested that Latinos “love having babies…There's no taking them out. They come in, just like they do in our country.”

Harris and the Democrats used the moment as a golden opportunity to highlight Trump's disagreement with voters. Trump is “stirring up the fuel of hate and division and that's why people are exhausted by him,” Harris said, while groups allied with Harris have already pulled television ads that edited out the remarks.

Still, Trump's team privately expressed astonishment at his ability to fend off controversy and suggested that the Puerto Rico issue, too, will pass quickly given the hectic pace of the news cycle, which has less than a week until the November election.

Some members of Trump's team also suspected that the silver lining of the rally was that it kept Harris out of the news and deprived her of oxygen – what they had long viewed as earned media or free advertising – and that she was just far enough away from it Election Day took place away so that it would be forgotten.