Final week farce: Trump Puerto Rico ‘garbage’ protest flops

“People of Puerto Rican descent in the key swing state of Pennsylvania, who number more than 450,000, have denounced the comedian’s comments,” Politico reported. “And some are planning to protest Trump’s rally Tuesday night in Allentown, which has one of the largest populations of Puerto Ricans in the state.”

So the stage was set. Then the protest came, and it was … not much. In the late afternoon, about 40 people gathered across the street from the PPL Center, where Trump would speak in a few hours. They held up Kamala Harris campaign signs, chanted a bit, waved a few Puerto Rican flags, and left. There was no showdown, even as Trump supporters waited in line across the street. 

According to the U.S. census, there are 125,855 people in Allentown. Of that, 68,232 are Hispanic. Of that, the majority have roots in Puerto Rico. Given those numbers, turning out around 40 protesters cannot be called a show of force.

A protester named Bella, who said she was of Mexican descent and lives in Allentown, told me she wanted to let Trump know that “he is not welcome here.” She said the thousands of people who came to his rally “don’t live here” because “the heart of Allentown is Latinos — as much as they hate it, we are the heart of this town.” A touch discordantly, Bella was also one of three women at the rally wearing keffiyehs. “Free, free Palestine!” she said when I asked her whether she might be mixing her messages. “Once one of us is free, we are all free.”

A member of the Allentown City Council, Ce-Ce Gerlach, was also at the protest. “Our city is no place for hate,” she told me. “Nope, not in our city.” When I asked her about the argument that the whole garbage thing, coming from a comedian, was just a joke and that people shouldn’t make too much of it, she became a little agitated. “People made jokes during the Holocaust,” she said. “People made jokes during slavery. People made jokes during internment camps. People made jokes during some of the worst times that we have faced as a country and the world. ‘Just jokes’ turns into gas chambers. It turns into internment camps. ‘Just jokes’ turns into second-class citizens. ‘Just jokes’ turns into people not being able to vote, to women not having reproductive rights. That’s what ‘just jokes’ turns into.”

Let’s just say that in the final days of an election, the rhetoric can get a little heated, even during uneventful protests. But the important thing about the Allentown protest, small as it was, was that it was part of a much larger effort by the Harris campaign, the Democratic Party, interest group activists, and a lot of media allies to juice up the “garbage” matter in hopes that it might hurt Trump in a critical swing state in the last week of the campaign.

Politico’s Playbook newsletter on Tuesday was a master class in anti-Trump political messaging synergy. It started by declaring that the Madison Square Garden rally “went off the rails” and that the “disaster” would follow Trump to Allentown, where there “won’t be a warm welcome.” The newsletter quoted a local Democratic official who said the “garbage” comment had “spread like wildfire” in Pennsylvania and that Puerto Ricans “are now furious with Trump,” which will give “an 11th-hour jolt to Kamala Harris’s campaign efforts there.”

“Some are planning to protest Trump’s visit,” Playbook continued, noting that Trump would speak “smack in the middle of a Puerto Rican neighborhood.” The Hispanic community is “paying attention,” with the owner of a Spanish-language radio station quoted as saying, “There are signs the uproar is breaking through.” Politico also said there is blowback in Puerto Rico itself and that Trump needed to come up with a plan to “stanch the bleeding.”

The point of all that is to create the impression that Hinchcliffe’s joke has taken over the entire 2024 presidential campaign and turned the page, flipped the script, and created new momentum for Vice President Kamala Harris. Did it? Is that really true? Or was the great garbage affair just one more kerfuffle that will be supplanted by others as the campaign hurtles toward its conclusion?

Already, there has been another twist in the matter, courtesy of President Joe Biden. In video remarks made public on Tuesday, Biden said, “The Puerto Ricans that I know, the Puerto Ricans in my home state of Delaware, they’re good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump’s] supporters.” Biden later released a statement that in saying “garbage,” he was referring only to the “hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico” at Trump’s rally. But, of course, that is not what Biden said at all. Trump supporters expressed the requisite outrage.

In the big picture: It was a bad idea for the Trump campaign to invite an insult comic to perform at the Madison Square Garden rally. Such comedians, in this case Hinchcliffe, pretty much do one thing, which is to throw insults all around, often in the most tasteless way possible. It’s not everyone’s thing. Why do it amid the audacious achievement of staging a big, capacity crowd rally in deepest-blue Manhattan?

But the Trump campaign did it. And Hinchcliffe said what he said, which was a collection of edgy and not-funny jokes that mostly flopped with the Trump supporters in the audience. While the “garbage” line got more groans and puzzled looks than laughs, it did jolt the Democratic media outrage machine into motion. It gave Trump’s opponents something new and fresh to focus on in the campaign’s last days. But the Allentown protest, in which around 40 demonstrators stood outside chanting while 8,000-plus filled the PPL Center to see Trump, suggested it won’t be a game changer.