Well, that was fast.
Mere seconds after Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy acknowledged “offensive comments about Latinos and Puerto Ricans and African Americans” were made at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, his colleague Brian Kilmeade attacked journalists for reporting on those comments.
The Sunday rally’s first speaker was comedian and podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe, who made a series of vulgar jokes about groups the former president’s campaign is actively trying to woo in the days before the election.
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That included a remark that Latinos “love making babies, there’s no pulling out, they come inside, just like they do to our country.” Hinchliffe also made a comment about Black people and watermelons, invoking a long-standing racist trope, and called the U.S. territory Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.”
“This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said in a statement, addressing Hinchliffe’s comment on Puerto Rico.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Gimenez (R-FL) were among the Republicans to condemn the mask-off MAGA spectacle.
On Monday’s Fox & Friends, Doocy was quick to point out the remarks and note the backlash from within the GOP.
“There was a comic who made some offensive comments about Latinos and Puerto Ricans and African-Americans and others,” he said, adding Hinchcliffe had been denounced by some Republicans and that even the Trump campaign distanced itself from him.
That did not stop Kilmeade from immediately stepping all over the moment in a baffling, instantaneous backpedal.
“It’s amazing, the cover of The New York Times: ‘Trump at Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism’” he said, reading a Times headline about the racist remarks at Trump’s rally mere seconds after his co-host acknowledged the racist remarks at Trump’s rally. “Only somebody who worked for the Harris campaign and [was] pretending to be a reporter for The New York Times would write something like that.”
Later during the broadcast, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the show that the Madison Square Garden crowd “didn’t mind” Hinchliffe’s jokes.
Most of Hinchliffe’s material fell flat and was met with indifference—though some bits prompted groans—in one of the more awkward speeches of the night.
That was an impressive feat given Trump supporter David Rem called Vice President Kamala Harris the “anti-Christ,” finfluencer Grant Cardone alleged Harris has “pimp handlers,” and radio personality Sid Rosenberg called Trump’s 2016 rival Hillary Clinton a “sick son of a b----.”
