Donald Trump has used an interview with US broadcaster ABC News to try and distance himself from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe and remarks made at the New York rally.
Hinchcliffe’s set at Madison Square Garden, in which he joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage”, has stirred particular anger given the electoral importance of Puerto Ricans who live in Pennsylvania, where Trump will visit today, and other key swing states.
Some of Trump’s top Republican allies condemned the comments. His campaign took the rare step of publicly distancing itself from Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico but not other comments.
As mentioned earlier, Trump did not address the issue directly at his Mar-a-Lago press conference, but in an interview with ABC said: “I don’t know him, someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is.”
The former president also insisted that he hadn’t heard Hinchcliffe’s comments. But, when asked what he made of them, Trump “did not take the opportunity to denounce them, repeating that he didn’t hear the comments,” ABC reported.
The comments have drawn outrage from Puerto Rican leaders a week away from the election.
The president of Puerto Rico’s Republican Party, Ángel Cintrón, called the “poor attempt at comedy” by Hinchcliffe “disgraceful, ignorant and totally reprehensible”.
“There is no room for absurd and racist comments like that. They do not represent the conservative values of republicanism anywhere in our nation,” Cintrón said in a statement.
Tony Hinchcliffe made offensive jokes about Puerto Rico and Latinos at the Trump rally in New York.Credit: AP
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