Tuesday, October 30, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 9
Outrage is building on Monday after Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday featured a comic and several other speakers making racist comments.
Approach a Puerto Rican in New York and play the video of Sunday night’s incendiary comments about their homeland, then watch the fire ignite.
The joke bombed but the explosive fallout reverberated across the country to the 5-million-plus stateside Puerto Ricans – many of them registered voters – and more than 3-million American citizens on the island.
“Convicted Trump didn’t say the words that were said at his rally. But it doesn’t matter because it was his rally,” Luis Miranda, political strategist, said.
In East Harlem, a who’s who of Puerto Rican federal, state and city locals held a news conference to condemn the comments uttered at a rally designed to gain supporters in a tight presidential election. Instead, the comments could backfire in a key battleground state.
“He made a calculated error yesterday. Basically he said goodbye to PA, to Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania we have 450,000 Puerto Ricans,” New York Democrat Rep. Nydia Velazquez said.
“This is about human rights, civil rights, and this is about my people, mother, my grandmother who died after Hurricane Maria. This is about our people who have suffered for way too long,” Frankie Miranda, of the Hispanic Federation, said.
Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory in 1917, and the first large wave of migration occurred after World War II to ease labor shortages. There are now more Puerto Ricans in the U.S. than on the island.
That festering resentment erupted when Trump visited Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria slammed into the island as a powerful Category 4 storm in 2017. He tossed paper towels into a crowd and denied the storm’s official death toll, with experts estimating that nearly 3,000 people died in the sweltering aftermath.
Source: ABC7 News
