Yes, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s ‘joke’ about Puerto Rico at Madison Square Garden turns out to be the big story from Sunday’s Trump rally. Will it make a difference at the polls next week?
This is Supposed to Help? – After the Trump/Vance campaign’s self-imposed October Surprise at Madison Square Garden Sunday, the ex-president on Monday followed up with these comments, according to The Hill, on former First Lady Michelle Obama, who has been campaigning for the Harris/Walz Democratic ticket:
“You know who’s nasty to me? Michelle Obama. I always tried to be nice and respectful,” Donald J. Trump said at an Atlanta rally Monday. “Oh, she opened up a little bit of – a little bit of a box. She opened up a little bit of something. She was nasty, ooh, ooh. She shouldn’t be nasty. That was a mistake she made.”
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Warning from Ukraine – Donald J. Trump must “face reality” that any attempt to freeze Russia’s invasion of Ukraine if he becomes president is “unrealistic,” says Oleksandr Merezhko, chair of the Ukraine parliament’s foreign affairs policy.
“This plan doesn’t look realistic because it implies the agreement of Vladimir Putin, who is absolutely unreliable and not trustworthy when it comes to observing any agreement,” Merezhko said of Trump’s plan to end the war within 24 hours of taking office. “At the same time, Putin, as of now, is not interested in negotiations and agreements. He still believes that he can win.”
It is unknown from this report in The Kyiv Independent whether Merezhko was being wry and perhaps a bit ironic about the Trump/Vance campaign’s motives and its relationship with Russian dictator Putin.
In September, Republican veep candidate JD Vance floated the idea of freezing the war and creating autonomous zones on both sides of the demilitarized zone while – wait for it; this is one of Putin’s main goals – keeping Ukraine out of NATO, according to the Financial Times.
Merezhko asserts that the only real plan is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “Victory Plan” to “strengthen Ukraine and thereby force Putin to sit at the table of negotiations.”
Meanwhile, North Korea … This comes after NATO confirmed that Russia has brought in North Korean troops into its Kursk Oblast, which Ukrainian troops attacked in August.
“The deepening military cooperation between Russia and North Korea is a threat to both Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic security,” said NATO Secretary-Gen. Mark Rutte, Reuters reports.
Not only do the North Korean troops give Putin more leverage in any future negotiations, they reinforce his long-anticipated plan to move into Lithuania and Poland if he has better success in Ukraine.
--TL
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MONDAY 10/28/24
Carnival at the Garden – Much news media coverage of Donald J. Trump’s four-hour rally at Madison Square Garden Sunday night has concentrated on comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s “joke” that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage,” and so as it turns out, we are leading with it too. The comedian also called out a Black man in the audience with a reference to watermelon, according to The New York Times, which headlines its story on the rally as “A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism.”
(In a statement reported by CNN, Trump spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said that Hinchcliffe’s jokes do not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.)
While Trump himself, two hours late to the event, avoided overtly racist attacks, the more disturbing comments from his opening acts may have been those against Vice President Kamala Harris that appeal most to the former president’s unwavering supporters from the New Apostolic Reformation movement -- Christian Nationalists.
From the stage, sanitation worker David Rem, 60, called Harris “the devil” and held a crucifix while “while delivering a particularly manic address,” according to The Independent, saying “the cross that I’m holding is the cross that my mother … used to hold in the air when she prayed at night, every night, for Donald Trump and his family, because we knew three years ago that he was going to be, his life was going to be attempted to kill (sic), because they don’t want Donald Trump at the ballot box.”
Real estate investor/equity fund manager Grant Cardone repeated vile lies about the vice president having “pimp handlers.”
Sid Rosenberg, 77WABC radio host and sports reporter, told the crowd that “fucking illegals” get “whatever they want” and ranted about Trump’s 2016 presidential election opponent, according to Mediaite.
“She has some sick posture, that Hilary Clinton. What a sick son of a bitch. That whole fucking party a bunch of degenerates, lowlifes, Jew haters and low lives.”
Tucker Carlson repeated Trump’s lies about Harris’ “changing” ethnicity, saying she wants to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”
The Garden’s scoreboard read “Trump Will Fix It” and the ex-president took advantage yet again of the opportunity to paraphrase his own catchphrase from his TV show, The Apprentice; “Kamala, you’re fired!”
“When I say ‘the enemy within’ the other side goes crazy,” Trump said, repeating his disturbingly authoritarian description of anyone associated with the Democratic Party, the press and pretty much anyone not on his side. He described the date of his potential election as the 47th president as “liberation day.”
Trump repeated his promise of mass-deportation of undocumented aliens and his senior advisor and anti-immigrant crackdown whisperer, Stephen Miller, said only his boss is bold enough to say “America is for Americans and Americans only.” (Per NYT).
Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr. (who asserted “the king of New York is back to reclaim the city that he built”) and Melania Trump were there.
So was Rudy Giuliani, who said, “This is where a Republican is not supposed to come. Which is why Donald Trump came here.”
--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa