In the final days of the campaign, both Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump’s camps have been attempting to appeal to Latino voters—a growing, key, and politically non-monolithic electorate.
What has been a consistent competition for these votes throughout the entirety of the 2024 election cycle intensified last week when Trump surrogate and stand-up comic Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as “garbage” during his time slot at the Madison Square Garden MAGA rally on Sunday.
“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,” Hinchcliffe, who has said comedians should never apologize, began. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” During his 12-minute remarks, Hinchcliffe also said, “These Latinos, they love making babies, too, just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.”
The pushback from Puerto Ricans across America was instantaneous. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, who first responded to the comments while on a Twitch stream with Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, said it was “super upsetting,” adding that her family is from Puerto Rico.
“The thing that is so messed up that I wish more people understood, is that the things that they do in Puerto Rico are a testing ground for the policies and the horrors that they wish … that they do unveil in working-class communities across the United States,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “When you have some a-hole calling Puerto Rico ‘floating garbage,’ know that that’s what they think about you.”
Celebrities with Puerto Rican heritage, including Jennifer Lopez and Bad Bunny, joined in, denouncing the remarks and expressing love for the islands—whose residents cannot vote in the presidential election despite being American citizens.
“You do know he’s a COMEDIAN, and these are JOKES, right????” the Trump campaign’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in an email to TIME magazine. “The joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” senior advisor Danielle Alvarez said in a statement, also to TIME.
“Nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rican community more than I do,” Trump said at a rally in Allentown, a majority Latino town.
“Puerto Rico is home to some of the most talented, innovative, and ambitious people in our nation. And Puerto Ricans deserve a president who sees and invests in that strength,” Harris said in a video posted the same day as Trump’s MSG rally. “I will never forget what Donald Trump did and what he did not do when Puerto Rico needed a caring and a competent leader. He abandoned the island.”
