Puerto Rico’s GOP chairman demands apology from Trump for comic’s ‘island of garbage’ remarks
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Protesters outside the Madison Square Garden arena, where former US president Donald Trump held a campaign rally in New York on Oct 27.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
SAN JUAN – Puerto Rico’s Republican Party chairman said on Oct 28 that he would withhold his support from former US president Donald Trump unless he apologised for racist remarks that an “insult comic” made about the US territory on Oct 27 during Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden.
While residents of US territories are not eligible to vote for president, Puerto Rico’s Republican Party or Grand Old Party (GOP) chairman chair Angel Cintron called on Trump to personally disavow comments made by comic Tony Hinchcliffe in an opening speech at his rally that referred to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage”.
Otherwise, Mr Cintron said during a talk show appearance, he would not be casting a symbolic ballot in the election for Trump, whose nomination he helped cement in July during a roll call at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee when Puerto Rico awarded all 23 of its GOP delegates to the former US president.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Oct 28.
Earlier, Ms Danielle Alvarez, a senior advisor to the Trump campaign, said in a statement that the Puerto Rico joke “does not reflect the views of president Trump or the campaign”.
But in a letter to Trump posted on social media on the night of Oct 28, the archbishop of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mr Roberto Gonzalez Nieves, said the explanation fell short.
“It is not sufficient for your campaign to apologise,” he wrote. “It is important that you, personally, apologise for these comments.”
In his letter, the archbishop wrote that Mr Hinchcliffe’s remarks “not only provoke sinister laughter but hatred”.
Trump made a rare apology on Oct 25 when he kept supporters at a rally in Michigan waiting in the cold for more than two hours as he taped a three-hour episode with podcaster Joe Rogan.
By and large, the former US president is not known for his contrition. In 2018, when Trump was facing criticism over an aide’s joke that Senator John McCain was irrelevant because he would soon die, Republican strategist Kevin Madden said: “The president has always throughout his career had a stance of ‘never apologise, never back down’.” NYTIMES
