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NEW YORK — The Republicans were in a damage control mode after a comedian’s shocking racist comments against Puerto Ricans and others at a rally here where Donald Trump was the main speaker.
At the rally at the Madison Square Garden on Sunday, the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, said, “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico”.
And he added another insult to all Latinos, saying, “They love making babies, too”, and went on to say something graphically obscene.
Reacting to it, President Joe Biden said during a campaign call on Tuesday, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonisation of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s unAmerican”.
Trump disowned Hinchcliffe, telling ABC News, “I don’t know him. Someone put him up there”.
A leading Puerto Rican politician, Zoraido Buxo, came to Trump’s rescue saying they won’t be rattled by it and endorsed him.
“We won't get rattled, we won't yield to ignorance, foolishness or irrational thoughtlessness, we will remain focused on what's really important”, she said at Trump’s rally Tuesday evening in Allentown, a Latino majority city in Pennsylvania.
Speaking in English and Spanish, she said her homeland was “a beautiful island, where I was born and raised, indeed a community very well anchored with steadfast conservative values of family, faith, economic freedom, and deep love of country”.
The Caribbean island of Puerto Rico was ceded to the US by Spain when it lost the Spanish-US War in 1898, but it was never integrated into the US.
It has a peculiar status because Puerto Ricans are American citizens who can vote in US elections if they live on the mainland, but not if they are on the island, which has its own legislatures
Buxo is the island’s “shadow senator” because although she has been elected by the island as its senator, she cannot sit and vote in the US Senate since the territory is not constitutionally a US state.
Pennsylvania’s Latino population is slightly over 8 per cent and their votes can swing the results in the state where Trump and Vice President Harris are virtually tied.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a Latino, said on X, “Puerto Rico isn’t garbage, it’s home to fellow American citizens who have made tremendous contributions to our country”.
“Those weren’t Trump’s words”, he said of the remarks by Hinchcliffe, whom he called an “insult comedian”.
According to Trump’s campaign, Hinchcliffe’s speech had been vetted and the insults to Puerto Ricans were not on it and he had diverted from the text to make the insults.
The campaign sources said that Hinchcliffe’s original draft had included a vulgar insult against Harris, which he was ordered to omit.
Harris dismissed the insult to Puerto Ricans as “nonsense”, and welcomed the support of two prominent entertainers of that ancestry, Jennifer “JayLo” Lopez and Bad Bunny.
Hinchcliffe also hurled insults at African Americans, Palestinians, and Jewish people.
Trump, who has flung insults at various communities, with Haitians his latest victims, has cut back on it in the final days of the campaign.
At his Sunday rally, he tried to be inclusive, claiming that he was building the “biggest, broadest coalition in the history of the country”.
“We bleed the same blood. we share the same hope. We are one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God,” he said.
But this last stage outreach attempt was undone by Hinchcliffe and other speakers with vulgar, sexist, and racist remarks about Harris.