Trump is desperately trying to fix his Puerto Rico crisis. It isn’t going well

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The final week of campaigning should be all about what George H W Bush used to call “the Big Mo,’” as in momentum. Ostensibly, that’s why Donald Trump wanted to have his rally in Madison Square Garden. Aside from being a New Yorker to his core, holding a huge rally in navy-blue New York City was meant to be a show of strength for Trump ahead of election week.

But the event became a disaster before Trump took to the stage. Early-in-the-night comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” set off a cascade of negative reactions that rapidly spun out of control.

The Trump campaign later distanced itself from the joke, but it was too late. Puerto Rican celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Liza Colón-Zayas, Marc Anthony and Luis Fonsi all denounced the remarks. Then, the final shoe dropped when Bad Bunny, one of the most-streamed artists on Spotify, endorsed Kamala Harris.

The Harris campaign has sought to make the most out of the remarks, touting the support of Puerto Rican superstars. On Tuesday, it announced that Lopez will join Harris in Las Vegas, a city with a huge Latino population.

Trashing an entire group of Americans — and yes, Puerto Ricans are Americans and only don’t have a vote because of a shameful colonial legacy — would be a huge gaffe, even by Trump’s standards. It opened old wounds for Trump, given his poor management of Hurricane Maria in 2017, where he famously threw paper towels when visiting the island. In one of his most vile remarks, he appeared to claim that Puerto Ricans were lying about how many people died in the two hurricanes that hit during that time period.

But the latest remarks have come at the worst possible time — as he was already set to visit Allentown, Pennsylvania as part of his final week of campaigning.

While Allentown and much of the Lehigh Valley are associated with white working-class steelworkers, the area has seen its Hispanic population explode in the past decade. Hispanics now make up more than half of Allentown’s population.

And Harris could not have planned Trump’s rally better. Last week, Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, visited Allentown as part of the Harris campaign’s Hispanic outreach.

Ironically, the same day as Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, Harris visited Allentown and released a video on her plan for Puerto Rico, which Bad Bunny shared on his Instagram account.

Of all the so-called Blue Wall states — which is to say, historically Democratic states that Trump won in 2016 but lost in 2020 — Pennsylvania has been the most difficult for him to back around. And Pennsylvania happens to be home to one of the largest Puerto Rican populations outside of New York and Florida.

This is not to say that Boricuas will uniformly vote for Harris. Trump famously called Mexicans criminals, drug dealers and rapists in 2016 and then proceeded to improve his margins with them in 2020.

The same proved true for Puerto Ricans despite Trump’s mismanagement of Hurricane Maria. In 2016, Trump won only 36 percent of the vote in heavily Puerto Rican Osceola County in Florida. But in 2020, he got about 42.6 percent.

In addition, Puerto Ricans have a history of voting for Republicans. Its non-voting delegate to Congress, Jenniffer González-Colón, is a Republican and she denounced Hinchcliffe’s remarks. Ronald Reagan also supported statehood for Puerto Rico and the 2016 Republican Party platform supported statehood, too.

Like many other Latino voters, Puerto Ricans have shown they can be won over by a focus on the economy and basic respect. But Trump’s decision to platform a comedian that demeaned the island turned what should have been a sprint to the finish into a dumpster fire.

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