That bad Puerto Rico 'joke' could actually cost Trump the election

Comic Tony Hinchecliff called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage" at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally last night, pissing off millions of Latino voters at the worst possible time.

Tony Hinchecliff had planned to call Kamala Harris a “cunt” in his deeply unfunny tirade at Trump’s New York rally Sunday night, according to new reporting by The Bulwark, but the Trump campaign caught the line ahead of time and scrapped it from the shock comic’s set. Unfortunately for Trump’s election hopes, the campaign failed to delete (or perhaps even approved?) Hinchecliff’s even more offensive lines about Black people and watermelons, Jewish people and money, Palestinians being “rock-throwers,” the size of Latino families, and Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage.” The whole unbelievably racist and antisemitic speech—and the Puerto Rico line in particular—has backfired so spectacularly on the Trump campaign that I started to wonder last night if Hinchecliff was actually a Democratic plant.

But the comic confirmed today, after Gov. Tim Walz charmingly called him a “jackwad” and AOC took the opportunity to point out that over 4,000 Puerto Ricans actually died in the wake of Hurricane Maria due to Trump’s negligence, that he actually did think those jokes were hilarious and that the rest of us are simply not on the level to be able to appreciate them.

Meanwhile, Puerto Rican icons Bad Bunny and Ricky Martin took their anger over the rally to Instagram, where they urged their 45.6M and 18.6M followers, respectively, to vote for Harris. “Esto es lo que piensan de nosotros (This is what they think about us),” Martin posted to his stories along with a video of Hinchecliff’s remarks. JLo also shared a video of Harris saying that Donald Trump “abandoned and insulted” Puerto Ricans, along with what looks like an endorsement of Harris. Keep in mind that nearly 6 million Puerto Rican voters live in the United States, making them the second-largest Latino group in the country—and a whole bunch of them live and vote in Pennsylvania, where Trump and Harris had been battling for their support before this all went down.

Republicans are, of course, melting down today about the massive unforced error. The Trump campaign claims his racist and antisemitic lines were “ad-libbed” and that they only saw the “cunt” one ahead of time, which is extremely unlikely given that the whole speech was pre-loaded into a teleprompter. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who’s up for re-election in Florida, called the Puerto Rico joke “not funny and not true” and insisted that he loves to vacation there, which is really not that helpful. Nazi Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) blew up at AOC for defending Puerto Ricans and suggested that she “have a baby” to try and be “happier.” And Elon Musk’s SuperPAC, which is hilariously just called “America,” found a way to call Harris a cunt on Trump’s behalf today to make up for the fact that Hinchecliff wasn’t allowed to.

Is the Madison Square Garden disaster the “October surprise” that ultimately costs Trump this election? I don’t know, but Republicans do seem to be pretty freaked out about his chances right now, judging by the fact that they’re literally setting ballot boxes on fire in the most liberal areas of competitive House districts to try and burn all the votes. Have you reached the “wanting to die” phase of this election cycle yet? Eight more days, folks.

In other news….

• I profiled Jessica Reed Kraus, a former left-leaning mommy blogger who’s now earning seven figures as a MAGA influencer and conspiracy theorist, for Elle. I think the story is pretty riveting, but I am biased.

• The Washington Post has lost 200,000 subscribers and counting since its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos blocked the editorial board from endorsing Kamala

• Michelle Obama delivered a powerful, righteous barn-burner of a speech about abortion rights at a rally in Michigan over the weekend that has me thinking she is actually a better orator than her husband and Bill Clinton combined