Team Trump's big mistake in Madison Square Garden

Donald Trump’s disgraceful rally at Madison Square Garden is the capstone of a campaign that has long been defined by its mask-off bigotry. Yet even by the standards of Trump’s past overt racism, last weekend’s foray into anti-Puerto Rican hate speech managed to break new ground in the Republican Party’s far-right transformation.

The result is a GOP scrambling to address a nationwide outcry among Puerto Rican voters who feel targeted by the right’s mocking description of their homeland as a “floating island of garbage.” Anyone who has followed Republicans’ accelerating descent into race-baiting grievance knew a night like this was coming. Still, Trump’s team didn’t hesitate to load conservative comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s cringe-inducing comments into the teleprompter.

Trump’s hate-fest in New York is another warning to voters about the grim future he offers the American people. If Trump prevails next week, his second term will look an awful lot like that chaotic and bitter rally.

That won’t be the case if the nation’s Puerto Rican voters have anything to say about it.

It’s clear senior Republicans recognize the potential political fallout from Trump’s big rally at the Garden. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who is locked in a close re-election fight with Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, didn’t even wait for the ex-president to finish before denouncing the anti-Puerto Rican rhetoric as “not funny and not true.”

Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Fla.), another Republican with a significant Puerto Rican constituency, claimed Trump’s handpicked speaker “doesn’t reflect my values or those of the Republican Party.” But if that was true, how did Hinchcliffe get his routine approved? Why was it loaded into a teleprompter and delivered to the raucous laughter and applause of the MAGA faithful?

None of this happened by mistake. In a GOP that has become little more than a political shock-jock, Hinchcliffe’s tone-deaf comments are par for the course. At this point, trying to hide that bigotry is pointless.

Other Republicans have decided to play the ignorance card. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Monday claimed to have not seen the rally or the offending comments — an unlikely story, given Trump’s well-known tendency to demand party leaders pay him constant attention. Johnson then dismissed Latino voters’ concerns about how such hateful comments made it into a presidential campaign rally unedited.

“I don’t think the stupid comments of a comedian that were ill-thought will make any difference,” Johnson said. The Speaker should speak to some of Pennsylvania’s 470,000 Puerto Rican voters before making such a confident and wrongheaded claim. Johnson should take a powerful hint from the panic on display in Scott, Gimenez and other Republicans who represent significant populations of Puerto Rican voters.

In fact, Puerto Ricans enjoy an election-defining presence not only in Pennsylvania, where they represent over 3.5 percent of the state population, but also in Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Arizona. In 2016, Trump won Michigan by a paltry 10,704 votes; the state’s Puerto Rican population alone numbers over 40,000 people today, more than enough to keep the state’s electoral votes in the Democratic column.

Altogether, nearly a million Puerto Rican voters reside in swing states Trump needs to win next week. Oops!

Trump is also finding himself facing headaches in North Carolina, where Republicans have been trying to pad their thin margins even before last weekend’s odious rally. The state plays host to nearly 116,000 Puerto Rican residents. Now many of those voters are voicing fury over Trump’s platforming of anti-Latino bigotry, and they are ready to cast their ballots for Kamala Harris in protest.

“We’ve already had to endure paper towels being thrown at us by our then-president and it wasn’t funny,” said North Carolina business owner Esther Ramirez-Pevney about Trump’s handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2018, where thousands died. “It’s not funny now to be called an island of garbage.”

Those hurtful comments are also driving a late wave of high-profile presidential endorsements from prominent Puerto Ricans — and they aren’t siding with Trump’s carnival of hate. In the last two days, the Harris campaign has touted major endorsements from Latino celebrities including rapper Bad Bunny. That may not matter to Johnson and Republicans, but the young voters Harris has been courting are avid fans, and the rapper’s support met with a surge of enthusiasm from young Latino voters across social media.

Spouting anti-Latino rhetoric in front of a frothing crowd of Trump loyalists may feel good in the moment, but it betrays the truth about the kind of president Trump would be in a second term. His America does not view Puerto Ricans as the citizens they are. In Trump’s view, their racial background reduces them to serving as the butt of crass jokes.

If the mounting fallout is any indication, Puerto Rican voters are about to make their distaste known at the ballot box. It would be a fitting electoral condemnation of a Trump campaign that long ago embraced racism over unity.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.