It seems to me that Tony Hinchcliffe, the podcast host and alleged “roast comedian” who warmed up the crowd at Donald Trump’s recent campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, could have found a less gratuitously cruel way to get laughs than to call Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
Call me old-fashioned, but I long for the days when candidates spoke not only to their loyal base but also those less ideologically committed to either party.
Yet there was Hinchcliffe, taking a snide swipe at Puerto Rico, the home of 3 million American citizens and ancestral homeland of millions more Americans living on the mainland. By insulting them and others, he was aptly setting the tone for the last week of Trump’s presidential campaign (if, indeed, it is the last week — we’ve all witnessed the protracted drama Trump is capable of when he loses an election).
We tend to expect the conclusion of a presidential race to be a time for each party’s nominee to move away from their most partisan positions and to appeal to the political middle. But not this year. More than ever, Trump and Co. are attempting to rile up his right-wing populist base and are sparing no artillery in their culture war. At the New York rally, speaker after speaker gloried in macho populism, peppering their speeches with swear words, xenophobic humor and, of course, misogyny galore.
This final doubling-down could help Trump grab headlines and mobilize some existing supporters, although it’s hard to imagine this will bring in new voters who are already turned off by some of the Republican presidential candidate’s rhetoric.
With the polls amazingly locked in a dead heat between Trump and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, the ex-president and his campaign minions have lost all inhibitions, not even blanching at pornographic references to the female candidate in the race.
Talk about battles between the genders. Trump at this stage, suppressing any appearance of desperation, looks remarkably liberated from the genteel rules of respectable society. And his supporters love him for it, even if it turns off others.
“It was too brotastic,” said conservative commentator Megyn Kelly of the Garden rally.
What made Hinchcliffe’s act so distasteful was that it punched down, violating the ethos of comedy. And it wasn’t particularly clever, either. At another point, he picked a Black face out of the crowd and used it as an opportunity to make a watermelon joke. Being funny is hard; merely offending, not so much.
Hardly anyone familiar with the current cachet of edginess should be surprised that the Republican Party has adopted it as a campaign mode. Like a lot of people who hang around politicians and party operatives these days, I have become accustomed to insults, followed by the predictable admonishments to lighten up.
Hey, MAGA, I’m only trying to salvage what’s left of productive discourse in this country. That’s not easy when one major party puffs out its chest in appeals to the “bro” vote.
Politics is not a wrestling cage match. And I, for one, am hoping Trump’s attempt to turn this election into edge-bro entertainment fails, if only to move our politics back to its original purpose of solving real problems.
In contrast to Trump, last Sunday in Philadelphia, Harris promoted a new pledge to boost Puerto Rico’s economy. Her message, which was thoughtful and empathetic, connected with voters who care about the welfare of this U.S. territory. Puerto Rican entertainer Bad Bunny posted Harris’ video pledging to create more jobs on the beleaguered island and rebuild its hurricane-battered power grid to his 45 million Instagram followers, and other Puerto Rican artists joined in.
The fundamental choice in this election is between the politics of solving problems for the common good and the politics of selective cruelty.
Rude and crude “bro politics” act out what The Atlantic writer Adam Serwer describes as “rejoicing in the suffering of those whom they hate and fear.” That is from his essay on the subject in his new collection of essays, “The Cruelty is the Point.”
Americans deserve better politics than this. But to get it, we have to find the courage to stand up to cruelty wherever we see it.
Clarence Page is syndicated by Tribune Content Agency. Readers may write to him via email at [email protected].