Vance - Don’t be so offended by racist jokes

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Sen. JD Vance said Monday that while he hadn't heard the racist jokes made by a comedian at his running mate's New York City rally the previous night, he thinks Americans need to "stop getting so offended."

"I’m just — I’m so over it," Vance said after an NBC News reporter asked about the inflammatory remarks about Latinos and others by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, the first speaker at former President Donald Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday.

"I’ve heard about the joke, I haven’t actually seen the joke that you mentioned, but I think that it’s telling that Kamala Harris’ closing message is essentially that all of Donald Trump’s voters are Nazis, and you should get really pissed off about a comedian telling a joke," Vance said.

Among the jokes by Hinchcliffe that sparked bipartisan outrage was his remark that "there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

There's a large Puerto Rican presence in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, and Trump's campaign tried to distance itself from the comedian's remarks.

This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said.

Vance, however, suggested it was just a distraction.

"My own view on this is, look, again, I haven’t seen the joke. You know, maybe, maybe it’s a stupid, racist joke as you said, maybe it’s not. I haven’t seen it. I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the joke," he said.

"I think that a lot of Americans are sick of the distractions and sick of the BS. They want our candidates to talk about how they’re going to solve the peoples’ problems, and that’s what we ought to do," he said.

Vance added that he'd recently heard from someone who'd been offended by a joke that comedian George Lopez told at a Harris rally, and that he told him, “Can we all just take a chill pill and take a joke from time to time? This is ridiculous.”

“We are not going to — we’re not going to restore the greatness of American civilization if we get offended at every little thing. Let’s have a sense of humor and let’s have a little fun and let’s go win in eight days,” Vance said.

Top Trump ally Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., took a different tack Monday, tweeting that "Puerto Rico isn’t garbage, it’s home to fellow American citizens who have made tremendous contributions to our country."

"I understand why some people were offended by a comedian's jokes last night. But those weren’t Trump’s words," Rubio added.

Hinchcliffe's routine, which included other racist jokes about Latinos and Black Americans, came just days after Trump said the U.S. is “like a garbage can” during remarks about immigration.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is seizing on a Donald Trump ally’s racist comments about Puerto Ricans this weekend to launch a digital ad targeting Latino voters that argues they “deserve better” than what the former president has to offer.

The 30-second spot will run online in battleground states on platforms like YouTube TV, Hulu and Snapchat, where Latinos consume a lot of their media, according to a Harris campaign official who first shared the details with NBC News.

Pennsylvania alone is home to more than 450,000 Puerto Ricans, according to census data, with more than 300,000 eligible voters, according to the Latino Data Hub at UCLA.

Beyond Pennsylvania, there are sizable Puerto Rican populations in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan, as well, where the race could be determined by mere margins.

In addition to the ad, the Harris official said the campaign will also place digital ads in El Nuevo Dia, the most popular newspaper in Puerto Rico, through Election Day. They will include a GIF that says in Spanish: “Focus on your family in the States. One voice, one vote.”

The new Harris campaign video starts out with the comedian’s own words before turning to Trump saying “Puerto Rico” and then ending on Harris’ comments about how Trump responded when Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017.

“I will never forget what Donald Trump did. He abandoned the island and offered nothing more than paper towels and insults,” Harris says, taken from a message her campaign had released Sunday as she was courting Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania, well before the Trump rally.

“As president, I will always fight for you and your families, and together, we can chart a new way forward,” the ad concludes.

As the fallout from Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally spilled into Monday, even some of the candidate’s closest allies were left lamenting the series of racist, misogynistic and vulgar remarks made before the former president spoke.

At its best, they say, the rally was a missed opportunity to deliver a cogent closing argument. At worst, it was emblematic of an undisciplined campaign — or even a darker sign of a movement that had enabled some of its menacing impulses.

John Fredericks, a conservative radio host and Trump ally, said the selection of radio host Sid Rosenberg and comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, in particular, was “asinine,” and that they “should have been better vetted.”

“Here we are talking about two obscure people that have nothing to do with this election, instead of the 100,000 people that were there, the tremendous speeches, the love for President Trump, the great closing of the campaign that Trump is doing,” Fredericks said. Madison Square Garden can hold about 20,000 people, though thousands more than that lined up to gain entry to the rally.

Meanwhile Peter Navarro, a former administration official and campaign surrogate, furiously posted that the comedian was “tone deaf” and “in poor taste” in the final stretch of the election, while David Urban, a former 2016 Trump campaign adviser, called it “unfortunate,” even if he said “it doesn’t spell the death knell” for the campaign.

Apparently the October surprise was a presidential campaign committing mass political suicide on stage at MSG,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump administration appointee.

For the one-night event at the famed arena, the Trump campaign essentially put together a mini Republican National Convention — but without the typical guardrails of a major political party event like vetted speeches.

Hinchcliffe’s stage name, “Kill Tony,” was part of the original list of speakers advertised sent out by the campaign. His jokes, who is known for insult comedy and celebrity roasts, were not reviewed or vetted ahead of the rally, according to two people familiar who were granted anonymity to discuss the situation.

And Hinchliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico was not among the remarks loaded into the teleprompter, according to a person with knowledge of the rally’s logistics, but it’s unclear how many of the offensive comments Sunday were included in speakers’ scripts ahead of time.

The reaction to his remarks, which also included offensive remarks about Black people, Jews and Palestinians, differs in at least one significant way to the response to the release of the crude “Access Hollywood” recording near the end of the 2016 campaign. Back then, a third of Senate Republicans expressed their disapproval with Trump, badly wounding him and leading toward a taped response from him. Now, though, even among the 18 members of the Republican Hispanic Conference, none made themselves available to POLITICO.

Donald Trump has a serious Puerto Rico problem — in Pennsylvania.

Many Puerto Rican voters in the state are furious about racist and demeaning comments delivered at a Trump rally. Some say their dismay is giving Kamala Harris a new opening to win over the state’s Latino voters, particularly nearly half a million Pennsylvanians of Puerto Rican descent.

Evidence of the backlash was immediate on Monday: A nonpartisan Puerto Rican group drafted a letter urging its members to oppose Trump on election day. Other Puerto Rican voters were lighting up WhatsApp chats with reactions to the vulgar display and raising it in morning conversations at their bodegas. Some are planning to protest Trump’s rally Tuesday in Allentown, a majority-Latino city with one of the largest Puerto Rican populations in the state.

And the arena Trump is speaking at is located in the middle of the city’s Puerto Rican neighborhood.

“It’s spreading like wildfire through the community,” said Norberto Dominguez, a precinct captain with the local Democratic party in Allentown, who noted his own family is half Republican and half Democratic voters.

“It’s not the smartest thing to do, to insult people — a large group of voters here in a swing state — and then go to their home asking for votes,” Dominguez said.

The timing couldn’t be worse for Trump. Almost a week before Election Day, he’s pushing to cut into Harris’ margins among Latinos, especially young men who are worried about the economy. But the comments from pro-Trump comedian Tony Hinchcliffe Sunday night, referring to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” has reverberated throughout Pennsylvania and elsewhere, prompting even the former president’s Republican allies to defend the island and denounce the comments. And with the race essentially a toss up, every vote counts — especially in Pennsylvania.

“This was just like a gift from the gods,” said Victor Martinez, an Allentown resident who owns the Spanish language radio station La Mega, noting some Puerto Rican voters in the area have been on the fence about voting at all.

“If we weren’t engaged before, we’re all paying attention now,” Martinez said. He added the morning radio show he hosts was chock-full of callers Monday sounding off on the Trump rally comments, including a Puerto Rican Trump supporter who is now telling people not to vote for the former president.

Local Democrats like Dominguez argue the fallout at the very least reminds Puerto Rican voters of Trump’s previous comments about the island, calling it “dirty” and tossing paper towels to survivors during a 2017 visit after Hurricane Maria devastated the island and killed more than 2,000 people.

And in a sign of how worried local residents are, a school district in Allentown announced Monday morning that it had canceled classes for Tuesday, when Trump visits.

And, some Pennsylvania GOP strategists, even as they tried to downplay the electoral fallout, acknowledged it was an unforced error at the very least.

Jimmy Zumba, a Latino GOP strategist based in the Lehigh Valley, called them “stupid comments,” that were clearly not based on the immigration and crime themes that Republicans have tried to hammer this cycle.

“Obviously I would love to be talking about that, to be on the offense on that, but right now we’re on the defense trying to defend comments that are not from the campaign or President Trump,” Zumba said, adding he didn’t believe the matter is “going to shift completely a Latino vote.”

But many local Puerto Rican community members are unwilling to let go of the comments.

Roberto L. Lugo, President of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the National Puerto Rican Agenda, said the nonpartisan group will be releasing a letter, shared exclusively with POLITICO, condemning the comments and urging Pennsylvania Puerto Ricans not to vote for Trump. Lugo, who was born in Puerto Rico and now lives in Philadelphia, said Pennsylvania Puerto Ricans are “really disturbed” over the comments.

“I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat, I’m independent,” Lugo said. “But at this point, it’s not about political, partisan issues. It is about the respect and honor our Puerto Ricans and Latinos deserved as citizens and legal residents of this country, that’s the issue.”

“We held Trump and his campaign responsible for this disgraceful act,” he added.

State Rep. Danilo Burgos, co-chair of the “Latinos con Harris” group in Pennsylvania, said residents have spread the comments on social media and within Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community.

“I saw two ladies in particular saying they were considering voting for Trump, but they’re not now,” he said, “because of the comments.”

He also said that Puerto Rican megastar Bad Bunny’s endorsement of Harris could be a game changer in Pennsylvania, arguing that a third-party candidate in Puerto Rico’s governor’s election surged from a double-digit deficit because the superstar got involved. Bad Bunny has not endorsed a candidate in that race, but has paid for billboards opposing Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon’s New Progressive Party.

“She was running away with the election,” he said. “Now that election is a statistical tie.”

Notably, Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s son, made a stop in Allentown on Monday, ahead of a planned event in Coplay, Pennsylvania, a Lehigh Valley borough outside Allentown.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on Monday also noted Trump made the choice not to distance himself from the comments.

The Archbishop of San Juan, Puerto Rico is asking former President Donald Trump to personally apologize for vulgar comments made about Puerto Ricans during a rally in Madison Square Garden over the weekend.

“I enjoy a good joke,” Archbishop of San Juan Roberto O. González Nieves wrote in a letter to the president posted on the Archbishop’s Facebook page. “However, humor has its limits. It should not insult or denigrate the dignity and sacredness of people. Hinchcliffe’s remarks do not only provoke sinister laughter but hatred. These kinds of remarks do not have a place in a society founded upon ‘liberty and justice for all.’”

He added, “I call upon you, Mr. Trump, to disavow these comments as reflecting in any way your personal or political viewpoints.”

The letter was posted in both English and Spanish.