“I don’t think anybody has ever seen anything like what happened the other night at Madison Square Garden,” Donald Trump said of his racist, misogynistic rally Sunday. “The love in that room, it was breathtaking. … It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest.”

Breathtaking, yes. Love, no.

A supposed comedian denigrated Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and said Latinos “love making babies” so much that “they come inside, just like they did to our country.” He talked about how he and a Black friend had “carved watermelons” together.

Another speaker warned that Vice President Kamala Harris and “her pimp handlers will destroy our country.” A third termed the Democratic presidential nominee the Antichrist, while Tucker Carlson demeaned her as “Samoan-Malaysian-low-I.Q.”

Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared that “America is for Americans — and Americans only.” The soundtrack featured “Dixie,” the Confederate anthem.

This is more of the sickening same, which raises the never-ending question: Denounce or ignore? These people crave a response — they live to trigger. Do we serve the public better by repeating their remarks or closing our ears? To respond to every provocation by Trump or his allies is more than a full-time job; to denounce everything is to risk exhausting the public’s capacity to respond.

And even the Trump campaign felt compelled to distance itself from the ugliest of Sunday’s rhetoric. “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said in a statement about Tony Hinchcliffe’s remarks about Puerto Rico.

So I might have been tempted to let this all slide, were it not for the reactions — first by JD Vance and then by Trump himself.

“Maybe it’s a stupid, racist joke,” Vance said, claiming not to have seen the Puerto Rico comments, but “maybe it’s not.”

In any event, he suggested, critics needed to lighten up. “Our country was built by frontiersmen who conquered the wilderness,” Vance said. “We’re not going to restore the greatness of American civilization if we get offended at every little thing. Let’s have a sense of humor and let’s have a little fun.”

A sense of humor? A little fun? You might think Vance, given the campaign’s position, could manage the same in the face of a surrogate who called a U.S. territory populated by U.S. citizens a “floating island of garbage.”

No. “I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America,” Vance said. “I’m just - I’m so over it,” he said. But this, as much as Vance might wish, is not about political correctness or knee-jerk oversensitivity. It’s about common decency. Apparently, that’s too much for the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee to muster.

Next came Trump, who first purported to distance himself from the worst of the event. “I don’t know him; someone put him up there,” Trump originally said. But asked what he made of the comments, Trump didn’t repeat his campaign’s criticism, saying that he didn’t hear them.

Then he decided to follow his Jan. 6 playbook by embracing the event instead of denouncing the outrage. Trump has described the violent insurrection as a “day of love.” And now we have the Madison Square Garden rally portrayed as an “absolute lovefest.”

We know what Trump means. Loyalty to him and praise for him outweigh and excuse any transgression. “I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” Trump said of those who believe in the conspiracy theory QAnon.

This Trump ego-stroking would be harmless if that were all that is happening. But the slavish devotion is accompanied by the foul concoction of racism, misogyny and vitriol brewed by Trump himself. The warm-up acts ape their leader. The extreme, insulting language — the vileness - comes from the top. He called Harris “retarded,” “mentally disabled,” and “a sh-- vice president” — the latter in front of the Catholic cardinal of New York.

Trump has soiled the public discourse in this way for nine interminable years. It was coarsened before his entrance on the national stage, but he has done everything possible to amplify the ugliness. We have become so accustomed to it we tend to forget how aberrant and unacceptable this is.

Reader, be assured: If he wins, if this garbage carries the day, these rallies will become commonplace, the hate and vitriol will become the standard — not just in New York, where Trump is from, but in every state, whether Trump or Vance is there to light the match or not. Within a very short time, this diseased idea of America will poison every gathering.

You want to know the stakes of this election? Not only democracy, but decency.