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Notes -
Joe Biden made the following remarks:
First this guy is the gift that keeps on giving. I really suppose he lowkey wants to tank his party out of spite with juuust enough plausible deniability. Let's start with unpacking. First - he twists what was said - it was a comedian act making a joke, not a speaker. Subtle but important difference. Even Jon Stewart pitched on the controversy by saying - I find this guy funny something is wrong with me.
Second - this comes from the president, is not a part of comedy act, and the republicans decided to give democrats run for the pearl clutching gold. And without some charity there is no way to deflect (I do think personally that he meant the speakers of the rally, but let's be honest - he deserves exactly as much charity as Trump campaign and kill tony got).
Now the media didn't let it slide even if they gave him somewhat more charity. It's called gaffe, where as a comedian joke is taken at face value. But that is to be expected in a way.
Do you think this will affect meaningfully the election?
The reason why the Puerto Rico as trash island gaffe may be cutting through in a way which the average "Republican says something vaguely racist" or "Democrat insults the rustbelt" story doesn't is that it isn't just an attack on the outgroup. The much bigger issue is that it may be, and can be spun as, a mask-off moment about who the outgroup is.
The big positive message of the MSG rally, and in my view the Trump campaign more generally, is "Real America is uniting behind Trump to crush the external enemy (illegal immigrants and an unspecified subset of undesirable legal immigrants) and the internal enemy ("far-left lunatics", which has a deliberately ambiguous meaning but appears to include the Democratic politicians letting the external enemy in). To make this work, Trump has to define "Real America" broadly enough to have enough votes. And, at the margin, the key groups that the Trump campaign have successfully included in their idea of "Real America" in a way previous identarian-right movements failed to do are black men with otherwise-conservative views and well-assimilated Hispanics. And the big threat to that outreach is the not-unreasonable fear among well-assimilated Hispanics that Trump's coalition don't see them as Real Americans, even as Trump himself insists that they are. If Musk or Vance or some other sufficiently prominent Trump supporter said "Actually, Puerto Ricans aren't real Americans" and didn't get slapped down then Trump would be toast.
Apart from Hinchcliffe, every other speaker who does a funny bit is clowning on MAGA's outgroup (mostly named Democratic politicians, but also California, flag burners, art fags etc). And that is what you expect at a unity rally. There is a time and a place for equal-opportunity clown-on-everyone comedy, but right after prayers and the national anthem isn't it - and in any case from reading the transcript of Hinchcliffe's bit, the nearest thing to an ingroup roast is where he suggests his own mother might have joined in the pet-eating in Ohio. There are, for the obvious good reasons, no jokes about inbred West Virginians, SSDI cheats, or fat divorced middle-aged men, and I do not think the audience would have laughed at them if there had been. It certainly looks like Hinchcliffe was put on the agenda to clown on the outgroup - probably a poor choice (and definitely a poor choice in hindsight) because his MO as a comedian is to go after everyone.
So when Hinchcliffe calls Puerto Rico a trash island and the audience laughs (from listening to the video, my guess is that a lot of them don't, but Hinchcliffe treats the half-laugh as a slow audience to warm up rather than a joke that went down badly, which does the Democrats' work for them spinning it), the message sent is "MAGA considers Puerto Ricans to be the kind of people it is okay to clown on straight after the national anthem at a unity rally." And that message is not consistent with the appeal to assimilated Hispanics that Trump has, to date, been making successfully. "Trump hates Puerto Ricans" is spin, but it is true that Hinchcliffe and the rally attendees who laughed at him think Puerto Ricans are their outgroup, that the Trump campaign chose Hinchcliffe to speak straight after the national anthem, and that Trump is sending flacks to deflect blame for what Hinchcliffe said rather than using his bully pulpit to say how much he loves Puerto Ricans.
Is any of this going to affect the election? Probably not, because nothing seems to be affecting the election - from outside it feels like everyone made their mind up within 2 weeks of Biden pulling out, and we are just waiting to see which side in a 50-50 nation has the better GOTV operation. But "Republicans think Puerto Rico is trash" is news in a way which "Biden thinks Republicans are trash" is not, so if anything is going to affect the election at this late stage, Hinchcliffe's gaffe is a candidate.
On the other hand, much of the Biden-turned-Harris campaign's message has been focused on how Trump is morally dangerous and demonizes people. If your message is that even people who disagree with you should vote for you because of your Moral Superiority™️, debasing yourself and even dipping a toe in the waters of open hatred makes it really easy to show the moral claims are a farce.
If you're an on-the-fence voter here -- maybe even disliking both candidates -- but leaning toward holding your nose to vote for Harris on account of "decorum", her boss calling your friends (the neighbor with a Trump sign on the lawn) "garbage" probably gives quite a bit of pause. At least it does to me.
I think "Prominent Democrats hate Trump supporters, think they are [insert slur here], and are happy to say so if they don't realise there is an open mic" is priced in by now - in much the same way that "Trump is uncouth" is priced in. Biden isn't saying anything in private that he wasn't willing to say in public in his 2022 midterms speech where he said "MAGA Republicans" were a threat to democracy (complete with scary red lighting in the background).
The point I am trying to make is that "MAGA see Puerto Ricans as outgroup" is not priced in - if Hinchcliffe had said Haiti was a trash island it would have been a dog bites man story.
I'd think it's roughly the opposite of that (at least in reality, but maybe you're making a good case for why pundits would try to make this stick). Puerto Rico works as the punchline because it's a funny surprise, exactly because they're not a serious outgroup currently, but are a decent sub-population in NYC. They can take being roasted in 2024, especially when the bit is more about the 'island of trash' setup, and the punchline just needs to be [real place].
It would have actually sounded a lot meaner and out of place if he said "yeah, I think it's called Haiti". That's where other comedians would start saying 'woah did this just turn into a klan rally?'
The ingroup would have been if the punchline was “Long Island” (or indeed Staten Island). Puerto Ricans aren’t GOP voters like Cubans are, they’re a core Dem base in NYC which is why people have said this was potentially strategically unwise (not that NY matters, but still). If he’d said Haiti NYT journalists would call the rally ‘racist’ on Twitter or say the remarks were “racially charged” in the press, but not much else would happen, because almost no Haitians are going to vote for Trump.
Given who the MAGA right see as their outgroup, "Manhattan" would have been even better. NYC also has notorious problems with garbage and rats - which are much more well-known than Puerto Rico's because, well, NYC. In the second half of 2024 they are introducing bins as a new, innovative garbage management innovation. The campaign to do this had used #Trashcity as a hashtag on the basis that everyone knew it referred to NYC.
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