Puerto Rico Is an “Island of Garbage”: Outrage Grows over Trump’s Racist & Xenophobic NYC Rally

AMY GOODMAN: With just one week until Election Day, outrage is mounting following Donald Trump’s campaign rally at Madison Square Garden Sunday. The New York Times described it as a “closing carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism,” unquote. During the event, one speaker described Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage.” Trump also continued to spew his racist rants and lies about immigrants, doubling down on his promise to enforce, quote, “the largest deportation program in American history,” unquote, and claiming the United States is now an occupied country. Trump also described Democrats as “the enemy from within.”

Other speakers included Trump’s running mate JD Vance, tech billionaire Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tucker Carlson, Hulk Hogan, Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s white nationalist, anti-immigrant policies which include the separation of families seeking asylum in the U.S.-Mexico border. These are some of the voices from the rally.

DONALD TRUMP: The United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer. … On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.

STEPHEN MILLER: America is for Americans and Americans only!

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, “You know what? Kamala Harris, she’s just — she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive,” as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ, former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.

DAVID REM: She is the devil, whoever screamed that out. She is the Antichrist.

SID ROSENBERG: She is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton, huh? What a sick son of a bitch! The whole [bleep] party, a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew haters and lowlives.

TONY HINCHCLIFFE: And these Latinos, they love making babies, too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country. Hahahaha! Republicans are the party with a good sense of humor. … There’s a lot going on. Like, I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.

AMY GOODMAN: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” Those, the words of the conservative so-called comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at Trump’s rally Sunday in Madison Square Garden.

Trump’s campaign has faced widespread anger and condemnation from elected officials, Latino groups, prominent Puerto Rican leaders from both political parties, including the head of Puerto Rico’s Republican Party, as well as Republican Congressmember María Elvira Salazar, who represents parts of Miami and has attended Trump rallies. Vice President Kamala Harris called the remarks “nonsense,” while Puerto Rican music stars Bad Bunny and Ricky Martin quickly announced their endorsement of Harris following Trump’s rally. Reactions to the racist comments included this response on ABC’s The View from co-host Sonny Hostin, whose mother is Puerto Rican. Hostin looked into the camera as she addressed Trump directly.

SONNY HOSTIN: Puerto Rico is trash? We are Americans, Donald Trump. Americans. … And we vote. Pennsylvania is home to almost half a million Puerto Ricans; North Carolina, 115,000; Georgia, 100,000; Arizona, 64,000; Wisconsin, 61,000; Michigan, 43,000; Nevada, 27,000. We vote, Donald Trump. Trash?

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Los Angeles, where we’re joined by Jean Guerrero, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda and Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, which won a PEN Literary Award. She’s a senior journalism fellow at the UCLA Latina Futures 2050 Lab.

Jean, welcome back to Democracy Now! Well, why don’t you just respond to what happened on Sunday? Twenty thousand people gathered at Madison Square Garden. Talk about what they heard.

JEAN GUERRERO: Well, what we saw there was an extreme escalation of the Latinophobic rhetoric that has defined the Trump campaign. And I want to respond first of all to the comments that were made about Puerto Rico. As a Puerto Rican woman with family on the island, who was raised by a Puerto Rican mother who taught me to love this country, to work hard for this country, to defend the vulnerable in this country — all of which appear to be foreign concepts to Donald Trump — I felt very personally offended by these comments but also was filled with a renewed conviction to defeat Trump, which I think a lot of Puerto Ricans are feeling right now.

The bottom line is these comments are evidence that the Trump campaign has nothing to offer the American people besides more hate and more division. They want to divide the Puerto Rican diaspora from the residents of the island. They want to divide Mexican Americans from Central American immigrants. They want to divide Latino men from Latina women. But these divisive tactics are not going to work. They’ve become extremely old. And people, Latina women and Latinos in general, are organizing in response to this extremely racist rally and making sure that they’re going to defend their communities.

But, in general, what these comments also showed during this rally is that they’re seeking to restrict the notion of what it means to be American, who is American, as we saw from Stephen Miller’s comments about “America is for Americans only.” They’re trying to restrict what it means to be American and laundering it through racist jokes. But news flash to the Trump campaign: As other speakers have said before, Puerto Ricans are Americans. They are citizens. And they are going to vote. They’re going to make sure that Trump never again steps foot in the White House.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jean, I’m wondering if you could talk about the potential impact of this especially in Pennsylvania, where not only is Philadelphia the home of the second-largest Puerto Rican population in the U.S., of any city after New York, but there are these other cities in Pennsylvania? Reading is 67% Latino; and Allentown, 54%; Lancaster, 40%. There’s an enormous — and most of these are Puerto Ricans. There’s an enormous Puerto Rican population in all these small towns in Pennsylvania, in addition to Philadelphia, that I’m sure this is going to have an enormous effect on — as these folks go to the polls this week.

JEAN GUERRERO: Absolutely. I mean, Puerto Ricans are something like half of the Latino vote in Pennsylvania and are a significant portion of the Latino vote and of the vote in general in the other battleground states. And so, I think what we’re going to see as a result of this completely unacceptable rhetoric is the mobilization of the Puerto Rican vote. And we’re going to see people show Donald Trump that we are not going to be divided, that the Puerto Rican diaspora, regardless of not living on the island, we have family on the island. We are proud to be Puerto Rican.

And what that also means is that we’re proud to be American. When the Republicans are trashing Puerto Rico, they are trashing America. And it’s no different from the way that Donald Trump talks about the United States as a dumping ground. You know, this — love of country has become a completely foreign concept to the Republican Party, as revealed by their complete disdain for Latino Americans, for Puerto Rico and for anyone from the region of Latin America. And what you’re going to see as a result of that open disdain, which has been going on for years but has been significantly escalated as of the past couple of days, is a historic mobilization of the Latino vote. And we’re going to make sure that Donald Trump never again is able to wield his power to oppress our communities.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering if you could comment, as well, about the comedian who opened this rally, the patently and really nakedly racist comments he made about other Latinos, about Palestinians, and, in general, his remarks?

JEAN GUERRERO: I mean, all of these remarks, it’s interesting that they choose to put these comedians forward, but it’s not a surprise at all. The laundering of white supremacy through so-called comedy is a common tactic. But when you look at the white supremacist texts and publications that have inspired top Trump advisers like Stephen Miller, it is very clear that they believe in the racial inferiority of people of color, and that not only that, but that they promote violence towards these communities. The end goal of Trump’s anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric is violence towards these communities. You know, they want to create an atmosphere of unsafety for communities of color across this nation. And it’s very serious. It’s not a joke.

You know, they are trying to launder this through comedy, but when you look at what these people actually believe, what they have advocated for, and the policies that they have put in place previously and that they plan to put in place in a second Trump term, these are extremely serious and potentially deadly actions that would separate millions of mixed-status families across the United States. Trump’s mass deportations in a second term would be — they would make his family separations from his first term look restrained. They would be separating millions of undocumented mothers and fathers from U.S. citizen children across this country, leaving them financially and psychologically devastated. We’ve already seen the consequences of this in a first Trump term, and it would be unimaginably worse in a second one.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play a few clips, Jean Guerrero. First, Trump’s former lawyer, the former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, who went on an anti-Palestinian rant as he took the stage.

RUDY GIULIANI: Hamas is not there for us! Iran is not there for us! They want to kill us! And the Palestinians are taught to kill us at 2 years old!

AMY GOODMAN: Last week, a federal judge ordered Rudy Giuliani to hand over his luxury Manhattan apartment and other costly possessions to a pair of Georgia election workers who he defamed after Trump lost in 2020. Now, as this, what the Times called a carnival took place, Kamala Harris lost no time especially on the attack on Puerto Ricans. On Sunday morning, she went to a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia. She also had released an ad there. But after this campaign rally of President Trump, Kamala Harris released another ad.

TONY HINCHCLIFFE: A floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.

DONALD TRUMP: Puerto Rico.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I will never forget what Donald Trump did. He abandoned the island and offered nothing more than paper towels and insults. Puerto Ricans deserve better. As president, I will always fight for you and your families. And together, we can chart a new way forward. I’m Kamala Harris, and I approved this message.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, we should say that the Trump campaign, after the enormous outcry, after Bad Bunny endorsed Kamala Harris right after all of this took place, the Trump campaign released a statement saying this joke, talking about the so-called comedian talking about Puerto Rico as an island of garbage, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” Danielle Alvarez, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. That was one comment they referred to. But there were many for hours at Madison Square Garden. I want to go back to former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller, who immediately launched into an anti-immigrant, racist tirade when he took the stage at Madison Square Garden.

STEPHEN MILLER: Who is going to stand up and say the cartels are gone, the criminal migrants are gone, the gangs are gone? America is for Americans and Americans only!

AMY GOODMAN: “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Now, Jean Guerrero, you are an expert on Steve Miller. You wrote a book about him, Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. People don’t usually get to see him speaking unless they’re at some of the rallies where he introduces President Trump. But he is very prominent in writing speeches and in creating — and in working with Trump on this particular issue. Your comments on his significance and in — one in a new Trump administration, where so many of the officials have left Trump at this point in his former administration, but not Stephen Miller?

JEAN GUERRERO: Exactly. He is one of Trump’s most trusted advisers, who shaped his immigration agenda, including the family separation policy, as you noted earlier, Amy. And when he says that America is for Americans only, it’s extremely important to note that when it comes to a second Trump presidency, it’s not only undocumented immigrants who would be deemed undesirable and disposable; it would also be Puerto Ricans, as we saw from this racist rally, even though Puerto Ricans are American citizens. It would also target legal immigrants. If Trump revives the Alien Enemies Act, as he vows to do, countless legal immigrants would be subject to mass internment and expulsion.

But it doesn’t even end with the foreign-born. When it comes to the vision of Stephen Miller and Trump’s other close allies, when they talk about Americans only, they’re talking about the far-right only. And I know this based on the fact that when Trump talks about a, quote-unquote, “enemy within,” he is echoing the title of a book called The Enemy Within that was written by Stephen Miller’s longtime mentor, a man named David Horowitz. And in this book, The Enemy Within, the entire political left is framed as an existential threat to the United States, one that must be defeated at all costs.

And so, when you listen to Stephen Miller talk about Americans only, a lot of people might feel safe, thinking, like, “Oh, you know, like, I was born in the United States.” A lot of Latino voters who are voting for Trump might think that they are immune from these expulsions and these really terrorizing plans that they have in place for the Latino community, but that’s absolutely wrong. They not going to stop with people who are undocumented. They’re not going to stop even with the foreign-born. If you are a liberal, if you believe in compassion and equality and freedom for all, you do not belong in Trump’s America. You are American only, in the American-only vision, if you embrace hatred, if you embrace division and if you embrace this exclusionary vision of America where only certain people who fit the white nationalist agenda belong.

AMY GOODMAN: Jean Guerrero, we want to thank you for being with us, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda and Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, which won a PEN Literary Award.

Coming up next, we speak with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University professor and fascism expert. We’ll also speak with a journalist who looked back at Madison Square Garden in an Oscar-nominated film, 1939, a Nazi rally held in the middle of New York City. Stay with us.