During a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in New York City on Sunday, several speakers engaged in racist rhetoric, including a right-wing comedian who opened the event with several bigoted “jokes.”
The rally took place at Madison Square Garden and was opened by comedian and podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe. In one of his jokes, he disparaged Puerto Ricans, referring to their homeland as a “floating island of garbage.”
Hinchcliffe went on to peddle malicious tropes about Black people, Jews, and Palestinians. He also mocked Latinx immigrants by claiming that they don’t use birth control — a remark which many commentators noted invokes the “great replacement theory,” a false, white nationalist conspiracy theory that immigrants are invading America to “replace” white people.
But his joke about Puerto Ricans garnered the most attention online, prompting backlash from many social media commentators, including Democratic vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minnesota) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), who discussed the remark during a live Twitch stream that was happening concurrently with the rally.
After being met with criticism, Hinchcliffe retaliated on the social media site X, using an insult related to menstruation to imply that people offended by his jokes were too sensitive.
“These people have no sense of humor. … I love Puerto Rico and vacation there,” Hinchcliffe wrote.
Ocasio-Cortez, who was born in New York but whose family is from Puerto Rico, responded to that post.
“You’re opening for Trump by calling Puerto Rico a floating pile of garbage. 4,000+ Puerto Ricans died under him,” Ocasio-Cortez said on X, referring to the Trump administration’s disastrous response to Hurricane Maria in 2017.
Ocasio-Cortez continued, writing:
This isn’t the comedy store. You’re using your set to boost neo-Nazis like [Marjorie Taylor Greene] & stripping women’s rights to the Stone Age. Your ‘sense of humor’ doesn’t change that.
Others noted that Hinchcliffe’s defense of his set was typical of other conservatives’ responses when their “jokes” targeting marginalized communities don’t land with audiences.
“Worth remembering that far-right speakers regularly use ‘humor’ to launder extremist and hateful rhetoric, hiding behind ‘It’s just a joke!’ every time they get called out,” said Washington State history professor Eugene Smelyansky.
Hinchcliffe “offered a KKK buffet of nauseating slurs” during his set, said podcast producer and author David Rothkopf, writing in a column about the rally for The Daily Beast.
Podcast host Fred Wellman noted that Hinchcliffe’s set was just one example of racism and vitriol during the event.
“The Republicans are desperately trying to spin the MSG hate fest down to ‘one bad joke.’ It was not,” Wellman wrote. “It was an entire day of vulgar racism, hate, threats of violence, and bigotry. That is Trump’s closing message. Those speakers were chosen for a reason.”
Indeed, the rest of the rally featured speakers who called Democratic candidate for president Kamala Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist,” with Rudy Giuliani claiming that Democrats were “on the side of the terrorists.” Trump himself denigrated immigrants living in the U.S., claiming that the country had been “invaded and conquered” by “vicious and bloodthirsty criminals” — a false characterization of immigrants, as studies have repeatedly shown they are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens are.
Despite other speakers spewing racist rhetoric regarding Latinx people (both immigrants and citizens living in the U.S.), the Trump campaign tried to distance itself from Hinchcliffe’s words specifically, perhaps because they garnered the most attention.
“This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” said Danielle Alvarez, a campaign adviser for Trump, referring specifically to Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico.
The joke in question, however, was known about by the campaign before it was delivered, as campaign staffers entered it into a teleprompter for Hinchcliffe before he began his set, indicating that it was likely vetted by the Trump campaign.
Alvarez’s contention that the campaign doesn’t endorse the joke is also dubious because Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of the Republican candidate for president, retweeted Hinchcliffe’s defense of his joke on X. Trump Jr. is a senior campaign adviser to his father.