The ugly truth behind the Trump rally’s Puerto Rico “joke”

In the days since comedian Tony Hinchcliffe insulted Puerto Rico at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City on Sunday by calling it “a floating island of garbage,” there’s been mounting evidence that this might be the rare gaffe that actually matters. The Puerto Rican community around the country is furious — and they happen to make up a huge chunk of the electorate in all-important Pennsylvania.

All of which raises a question: What was the Trump team thinking? Why, why would they give an insult comic a platform to take shots at Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, Jews, and Black people?

The obvious answer is that the kind of people who run Trump’s campaign find this kind of “edgy” humor funny. Trump’s team reviewed and approved most of his set beforehand, cutting a joke they thought was too much (calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “c*nt.”) Though they insist the Puerto Rico line was ad-libbed, the fact remains that they knew who Hinchcliffe was when they put him up there.

But there’s a deeper truth here. The rising tolerance of outright racism in the GOP — often dressed up as a “joke” — reflects the influence of an energized and transgressive far-right youth movement in the party. And while that movement lends the Trumpified right a certain vitality, it also works to render it (even more) toxic to ordinary Americans.

Historian David Austin Walsh recently coined a memorable term to describe this group’s rising influence: “the groyperfication of the GOP.”

The term refers to the so-called Groyper movement, a loose group of young neo-Nazi internet trolls led by pundit Nick Fuentes. Groypers, the heirs to the alt-right of the 2010s, aim to push the boundaries of mainstream discourse rightward one racist meme at a time. They are obsessed with allegedly prohibited topics, like Holocaust denial or the purported link between race and IQ, which it seeks to make part of mainstream Republican discourse.

Walsh notes that these groyper-adjacent ideas have real pull among both young Republican staffers and the conservative movement’s intellectual elite. At this point, there’s little doubt that this is the case: Fuentes famously dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022; since then, has been linked to Republican Hill staffers and megadonors. Elon Musk personally reinstated Fuentes’ previously banned account on X/Twitter, where he currently has over 400,000 followers.

There’s a certain joy in transgression — a thrill in feeling countercultural — that powers the online right’s pro-Trump activism. Yet the ways in which they transgress are toxic (and rightfully so). Exploring groyperesque ideas about, say, Black genetic inferiority only feels like an exciting transgression for, as Walsh puts it, a small group of “college-educated men with intellectual pretensions.” What these young white righties find smart or funny, most other Americans find abhorrent — leading them to miss how someone like Hinchcliffe would play among normies.

Walsh compares this to the left’s well-documented “Latinx problem.” The term, widely used by elite Democrats until very recently, was an attempt to bend the Spanish language into gender neutrality. According to one study, some Latinos found “Latinx” so alienating its spread may very well have driven some into Trump’s arms — reflecting a disconnect between the ideological aims of elite Democrats, including elite Latinos, and how ordinary voters see the world.

But I’d argue the so-called “dirtbag left” of the late 2010s is an even more direct comparison.

Much like the Groypers, dirtbag socialists aimed to make social change through provocative humor and online aggression bordering on harassment. The “posting-to-praxis pipeline,” as they called it, indeed helped raise the prominence of socialism in American politics — winning converts among Brooklyn progressives and quite a few young professional Democrats. Except when the dirtbag left tried to throw its weight around politically, campaigning aggressively for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary, they turned into a liability — seemingly costing him support at both the elite and grassroots voter level.

Today, the dirtbag faction has minimal influence on either the Democratic Party or American politics more broadly. After October 7, 2023, some of the media personalities in the dirtbag universe could be found apologizing for and even outright endorsing Hamas’s violence — a position with almost no support among the general American population and one condemned by even the most left-wing elected Democrats.

In both cases, the Groypers and the dirtbag left, you had an energized and radical youth-led faction that managed to be wildly successful within its own niche — but one that proved a political liability outside of its insular niche. Yet the two parties handled the two factions very differently.

The Democrats’ extremist flank are, in fact, extremists: They only speak for a fringe of relevant party actors. As a consequence, the dirtbag-types faced real backlash when they tried to establish themselves as a major player in a party primary. 

But in the Republican Party, the extreme is now the mainstream. Trump is the unquestioned party leader, and groyper-esque Tucker Carlson is its chief ideologue. There is no internal pushback against the ideological extremism among the party’s up-and-coming youth, because said extremism has already won the day.

What’s popular among the party’s radicals is, increasingly, what the party chooses to do. No one is capable of telling young righties that what they find thrilling is electoral poison; that making tasteless jokes isn’t punkish transgression, but creepy, off-putting anti-social behavior. In fact, racist comedy is so normalized that it’s now given top billing at a closing-argument rally.

And if the warning signs about Puerto Rican voters prove real, the end consequence of this radicalization could be electoral defeat.

This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.