Vice President Harris’s campaign wasted no time making hay of the backlash against a crude comedy set at former President Trump’s Madison Square Garden (MSG) rally on Sunday.
The Harris campaign on Monday cut and released an ad tying comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s set, where he compared Puerto Rico to a seafaring garbage patch, to Trump’s treatment of the island.
The ad replays images of hurricane devastation in Puerto Rico set to Hinchcliffe’s punchline — “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean, I think it’s called Puerto Rico” — cutting to a black screen and Trump’s unorthodox pronunciation of “Puerto Rico” at a 2017 Hispanic Heritage Month event.
The black-and-white 30 second short follows with a Harris voiceover from a Puerto Rico policy proposal her campaign released Sunday set to more images of hurricane devastation and an infamous video of Trump tossing paper towels at hurricane survivors.
“I will never forget what Donald Trump did,” Harris says in the ad. “He abandoned the island and offered nothing more than paper towels and insults.”
The ad turns to color as Harris makes her pitch to Puerto Rican voters, a key demographic in critical swing states like Pennsylvania.
The quick-reaction short is part of the Harris campaign’s efforts to highlight the now-disavowed comedy sketch that made fun of Hispanic, Black and Jewish voters — as well as directly singling out Puerto Rico — just more than a week before Election Day.
Though Trump did not disavow Hinchcliffe’s set during the Madison Square Garden rally, spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said in a statement, “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” in a rare damage control moment from his team.
Other Republicans including Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.) and Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar (Fla.) and Anthony D’Esposito (N.Y.), as well as Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González-Colón, who is running for governor, independently panned Hinchcliffe’s remarks.
