No One's More Shocked Than Donald Trump That These Racists Keep Appearing At His Racist Rallies
Quite the October surprise
Donald Trump’s less dignified Klan rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday recalled images of the pro-Hitler rally at the Garden in 1939. The air was filled with a similar whiff of jackboots even if the proceedings often resembled a bad open mic night where the acts think obviously racist material is edgy.
Tony Hinchcliffe, who calls himself a comedian, delivered a profane, joke-less set that managed to offend anyone with a functioning brain stem and a human soul.
“There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,” he said. “Yeah. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
Well, as Oscar Wilde said (sort of), “All publicity is good publicity.”
Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, but Trump has smeared Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, and Baltimore. The common factor has nothing to do with perceived crime rates. The video clip, which I won’t share, of Hinchcliffe’s racist one liner quickly went viral, and Puerto Rican celebrities Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin condemned the remarks and expressed their support for Kamala Harris, sharing the sane video she released on Sunday that discussed her proposals for boosting Puerto Rico’s economy.
Hinchcliffe insulted Latinos in general, Black people, Palestinians, and Jews. Discussing the Israel/Hamas conflict, he said, “When it comes to Israel and Palestine, we’re all thinking the same thing. Settle your stuff already. Best out of three. Rock, paper, scissors. You know the Palestinians, they’re going to throw a rock every time. But you also know the Jews have a hard time throwing that paper, if you know what I’m saying.” (Yes, I’m afraid we do.)
Puerto Rico has no electoral votes but almost half a million Puerto Ricans live in Pennsylvania, whose 19 electoral votes will help decide the election and where the fallout is currently “spreading like wildfire.”
Some Republicans quickly distanced themselves from Hinchcliffe’s grossness, and Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez released a less than glowing review: “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
Of course, Hinchcliffe’s entire act — along with the slime trail of repugnance that followed him — reflects Trump’s views. Trump has run the single most bigoted campaign in U.S. presidential history, and this includes elections when the candidates owned slaves.
A self-inflicted October surprise?
On October 28, 2016, FBI Director James Comey sent Congress a letter stating that the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” of Hillary Clinton’s personal email server. This likely cost Clinton the election, and Nathaniel Hawthorne justice would demand that Comey spend the rest of life wearing a large “E” on his chest.
Every day of Trump’s campaign has been a racist hate rally, but Sunday’s was different. The mainstream media hasn’t sanewashed the event. The New York Times headline read, “The Misogynistic, Bigoted and Crude Rally Remarks Trump Hasn’t Disavowed.”
The emails that the FBI discovered and Comey couldn’t keep quiet about for another 11 days were only tangentially related to the FBI’s investigation into Anthony Weiner’s illicit text messages to a 15-year-old North Carolina girl, but this added an extra salacious element to the story, which soon appeared on the front page of the Times and dominated the news cycle.
Trump benefits whenever voters aren’t actively reminded that he’s terrible. It’s why he was so desperate to buy Stormy Daniels’ silence in 2016 (and still is). Yet, curiously, some Democrats think we should keep focused on Trump’s poor economic policies.
“The strategy is familiar and predictable by now,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg posted on social media. “A pile of outrageous statements — all to ensure we spend the next days talking about him, not about you and not about how Kamala Harris will make life more affordable and restore the right to choose that he took away. It’s bait.”
This argument assumes that Trump has a calculated “trash talking” strategy when he’s actually just trash. I can understand why Buttigieg might not want to share the Hinchcliffe clip, but the current GOP House Speaker was at this rally. We can only imagine the fallout if Harris and Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries had headlined a Night Of 1,000 Racist Laughs. No Republican would demand that voters focus on Harris’s health care plan instead. Fox News went ballistic when Barack Obama invited the rapper Common to the White House.
“It’s bait,” Buttigieg insisted in a later post. “Donald Trump is about tax cuts for the rich and eliminating abortion access. Crime went up and jobs went down on his watch. Kamala Harris is actually focused on expanding rights and freedoms and helping working families & the middle class. Tune out the noise.”
It’s not bait. Bigotry is the whole platform. The “bait” theory is not far removed from suggesting the core of disagreement between the Union and Confederacy was economic policy. Nikki Haley wants tax cuts for the rich and reduced abortion access. She wouldn’t have had that rally. And most Never Trumpers wouldn’t have endorsed Harris if Haley were the nominee. It’s somewhat of a mixed message for Democrats to talk about this election’s supposed existential stakes while otherwise focusing on politics as usual. Politics are very strange and unusual right now but not in a charming Lydia Deetz way.
I appreciate the mainstream Democrats don’t want to talk about how awful Trump is all day. They’d rather have constructive debates about policy, but this isn’t the model UN or even an episode of The West Wing.
Hitler’s antisemitic rants predicted his antisemitic policies and genocide. They weren’t a shiny antisemitic bobble intended to “distract” Germans from Hitler’s anti-union policies and proposed wage freezes. Hitler didn’t promote antisemitism as a cynical means to gain power. He gained power so he could implement antisemitism. The same is true for MAGA’s bigotry and misogyny. Giving tax cuts to billionaires is just the means to that end.
Democrats shouldn’t engage with rabid racists and drooling misogynists as if they’re no different from a typical terrible Republican, even the ones who just kept their white hoods at home when leaving for a rally. Democrats should also stand up for minority groups against vicious MAGA attacks. If a bully punched another student in class while shouting racist slurs, the teacher shouldn’t tell the other kids to ignore the injured student because the bully just wants attention and is trying to distract them
Matt Gaetz, who’s somehow still a sitting member of Congress, posted on social media, “To everyone mad at @TonyHinchcliffe. IT WAS A JOKE!” It’s not clear what the actual “joke” was but JD Vance told supporters on Monday, “We have to stop getting so offended over every little thing in the United States of America.” (You’ll recall that MAGA freaked out when Tim Walz joked about “white guy tacos.”)
Mark Caputo at the Bulwark reports that the Trump campaign had reviewed a draft of Hinchcliffe’s routine in advance. According to a campaign insider, “He had a joke calling [Vice President Kamala] Harris a ‘cunt,’” but that was flagged and removed. The sources say the objectionable lines were ad-libbed, but that Puerto Rico “zinger” lacked the spontaneity of casual racism. (He reportedly tried out the line at a New York comedy club on Saturday.)
Those who believe no scandal ever truly sticks to Trump will point to how he survived the Access Hollywood tape’s release. However, if the election were held a week later, he probably would’ve lost. Trump also benefitted from Russia dropping damaging information about Clinton on the WikiLeaks site.
However, Trump’s Sunday Klan bake was the closing message he meant to deliver. It wasn’t a gaffe but a statement of sinister purpose. It’s up to voters now to fully reject his dark, twisted vision.
The analogy about the bully reminds me of a story Dan Savage told about he and his father. When Bush Deux was running for office he said many anti-gay things and courted the anti-gay vote. Savage's dad told him Bush just said that to get votes. Savage replied "What if he was punching me in the face to get votes? I'm still getting punched in the face, whatever the reason."
The strawman arguement of people saying things "just to get votes" is non-sensical. It doesn't matter why they said it.
As the brilliant Maya Angelou said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
Great article again, SER.
"Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez released a less than glowing review: “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”"
I want to point out to this quisling that yes, yes it does because he was a speaker on your stage behind your lectern with your campaign sign. Also it definitely does because he was reading most of this from teleprompter. And your execrable, Nazi campaign even vetoed a misogynistic 'joke' from his set. But the rest was okay.
I'm especially tired of these quislings. I want to say to them...each of them caping for this mantoddler. When he has comedians making the yuk-yuk jokes about Black people carving watermelons, or calling Latinos promiscuous or calling Puerto Ricans garbage? He means YOU too. No matter how much you think "you're one of the good ones" or "you were here the right way" or "I'm not like those refugees, I was born here?"
When Herr Miller is up on that dais saying "America is for Americans Only," he doesn't mean YOU.