Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe set the internet ablaze and invited condemnation even from the campaign he was supporting on Sunday when he made several racist “jokes” that may have alienated potential Donald Trump voters at the former president’s New York rally on Sunday. But the controversial host of the “Kill Tony” podcast has long been known for that type of “comedy.”
Hinchcliffe took the stage at Madison Square Garden and attacked several groups of people during his remarks, like when he called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” and said Latinos “love making babies.”
“There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that,” he added. “They come inside. Just like they did to our country.” He also used a racial trope when he aligned a Black man in the crowd with watermelon, among other incendiary comments.
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On Monday the Trump camp said in a statement, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” But considering Hinchcliffe had already garnered a reputation for making racist remarks in his comedy, the statement doesn’t hold water.
In 2021, Hinchcliffe was dropped from his agency and had several upcoming performances canceled after he called comic Peng Dang a racial slur on stage and mimicked an Asian accent while making comments about soy sauce. He doubled down once he gained new representation and appeared on the YouTube show “TRIGGERnometry,” where he insinuated Dang was a “Chinese spy” and called fallout from his using a slur “an orchestrated attack by the Chinese media.”
Three years later, Hinchcliffe has never expressed any regret for his comments, and in April told Variety of the incident, “I knew that what I had done was not wrong,” and “comedians should never apologize for a joke.” He also agreed (without naming Dang) that “being offended is one hundred percent a way to advance in the business.”
Hinchcliffe is also known for making “jokes” about the public murder of George Floyd. He told Variety, “I have a George Floyd joke that I do.” Not getting said joke shows, according to Hinchcliffe, that one is not a “high-level stand-up fan,” or “doesn’t know comedy.” All that taken into account, it’s hard to believe Trump’s campaign wouldn’t have known what they were getting when Hinchcliffe was invited as a speaker.
The comedian last drew outrage earlier this year, when he used a homophobic slur and crassly joked about Kim Kardashian at Tom Brady’s roast on Netflix. “A whale’s vagina, which reminds me, Kim Kardashian’s here. She’s had a lot of Black men celebrating her end zone,” he said, adding, “Kim, word of advice, close your legs. You have more public beef than Kendrick and Drake.”
Elsewhere in the Variety interview, the comic pushed right-wing talking points, including the idea that being offended by a racial comment is “virtue signaling,” as is masking against COVID, which may have been all Trump’s team cared about before they recruited him to speak at MSG.
Trump, meanwhile, has made disparaging comments about immigrants and potential Black and Latino voters for years that Republicans have repeatedly downplayed. Now, Trump’s campaign staff is saying Hinchcliffe’s “joke” about Puerto Rico being garbage Sunday night was “in poor taste,” as both Republicans and Democrats alike (not named Marjorie Taylor Greene) agree the jokes went too far.
With only a few days to go before a neck-and-neck election, alienating a significant portion of the population—including nearly one million Puerto Ricans in swing states—may not seem like the smartest move. But it’s one the Trump campaign should have seen coming.
