The comedian who denigrated Puerto Rico and Hispanic people at a Trump rally on Sunday night was planning to call Kamala Harris the C-word before campaign aides intervened, reports say.
Tony Hinchcliffe was condemned across the political spectrum after he took the stage at Madison Square Garden to call Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage" and invoke racist tropes about Jews and Black people.
But according to the right-leaning, anti-Trump news site The Bulwark, his original draft included a line where he called Harris the C-word, which one campaign source described as "a red flag".
Campaign staff asked Hinchcliffe to remove the joke, and he did so, the site reported, but they reportedly did not spot his other insulting lines because they were ad-libbed.
It comes after Elon Musk's pro-Trump super PAC, named America PAC, teasingly called Harris "a C-word" in a now-deleted post on the social media site X.
Only later in the video did the fundraising organisation reveal that it meant she is a Communist.
Hinchcliffe's jokes were merely one controversial element of Trump's much-heralded campaign event on Sunday evening, in which speakers labelled Harris "the antichrist", "the devil", and "low IQ".
After the rally, Hinchcliffe defended himself and refused to apologize, saying he "made fun of everyone" and that Harris's running mate Tim Walz should "change [his] tampon.”
But the Trump campaign distanced itself from at least one of Hinchcliffe's jokes – the one about Puerto Rico – by saying that it "does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
Sources who spoke to The Bulwark expressed mixed feelings about the comedian's set.
"It’s a joke. People need to grow up. This is what we’re campaigning against: PC culture run amok," said one.
"This isn’t the hill we need to die on,said another. "Puerto Rico as a trash island – for f***'s sake!"
