“Tony Hinchcliffe is my friend,” former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said after the insult comic made jokes at the expense of Puerto Ricans and others at Donald Trump’s New York rally on Sunday. But he gave “DNC strategists” a “gift,” the Trump surrogate wrote on X/Twitter.
The anti-vaxxer conspiracist who Trump recently announced would have a “have a big role in healthcare”—and specifically “women’s health”—if he wins the presidency, spoke out in defense of Hinchcliffe on social media Friday, while also trying to do some cleanup for Trump with Latino voters.
“[Hinchcliffe’s] special comedic aptitude for shattering orthodoxies and offending sensitivities has made him the king of roast comedy,” RFK Jr. wrote in his long-winded post, and yet “I knew the joke would also hurt the feelings of my many Puerto Rican friends.”
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Kennedy officially entered the MAGA orbit after Trump‘s assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Since then, he exited the presidential race and threw his support behind the former president, reportedly in exchange for a role on Trump’s transition team and a cabinet position if he wins.
“Politicians, military brass, and corporate leaders use the island as a dumping ground for substandard business practices while blaming Puerto Ricans for their poverty, poor health, and environmental degradation on the island,” Kennedy wrote in an attempt to explain away the controversy. “This is some of the ‘garbage’ that Tony was referring to in his unfortunate joke.”
That said, he admits that no matter the backstory, or “groans of the crowd” from Trump’s rallygoers, the damage to Trump’s Latino support was done, but only because of “the DNC’s allied corporate media.”
Despite Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller’s comment that “America is for Americans only,” Tucker Carlson’s calling the vice president “low IQ” and making fun of her ethnicity, and several other hateful remarks made at the rally, RFK Jr. insisted in his post you shouldn’t believe your eyes or ears. It’s the media, he writes, that “weaponized the [Puerto Rico] joke to validate their mischaracterization of the rally as a rightwing Nazi hate fest.”
He went on to say, as Trump has in the past, that “no U.S. president has done more for Puerto Rico in recent decades” and touted the endorsement of Zoraida Buxó, Puerto Rico‘s shadow senator. Kennedy also insisted that “As a New York businessman, President Trump watched and appreciated the economic contributions of Puerto Ricans in New York,” despite Trump being sued in the 1970s by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division for allegedly refusing to rent apartments to Puerto Ricans and Blacks.
