North Dakota’s Republican Gov. Doug Burgum on Sunday dismissed concerns that a comedian’s racist remarks about Puerto Rico at a campaign rally for former President Donald Trump would affect the election, while also blasting President Joe Biden for comments he made earlier this week when responding to those jokes.
“This is not how Trump supporters feel,” Burgum said about a joke comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made at a Trump rally in New York last weekend in which he called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”
Burgum pointed to the reaction in the arena when Hinchcliffe made the joke, saying, “The crowd was groaning. I mean, there was not approval from a very supportive Trump audience.”
The governor compared the two remarks, saying that Hinchcliffe was a “comic that no one’s ever heard of” versus “the president of the United States calling half the voters in the country garbage.”
He was referring to Biden’s remarks last week on a Latino voter outreach call. Responding to Hinchcliffe’s joke, the president said Puerto Ricans are “good, decent, honorable people.”
He added, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done.”
The White House later clarified his comments, saying he was speaking about the rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally rather than Trump supporters.
On Sunday, Burgum responded to a clip of Trump calling “the people that surround” Harris “scum” and “garbage.”
At a September rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, the former president criticized the vice president, saying, “It’s not her, it’s the people that surround her. They’re scum, they’re scum, and they want to take down our country. They are absolute garbage.”
Burgum told moderator Kristen Welker that voters won’t be swayed by comments like that.
“The parsing of comments from the last seven days is not what’s going to determine the election,” he said.
Burgum added, “This is American politics. This is the season of the last week before election. There’s always been, there’s always a lot of name-calling in the last week. This has all happened before, but I think at the end of the day, the voters are going to make a decision about, you know, their own condition.”
