The Republicans were in damage control mode after a comedian made shocking racist comments against Puerto Ricans and others at a rally here where Donald Trump was the main speaker.
At the rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe told the crowd, "I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it's called Puerto Rico".
And he continued his rampage against all Latinos, calling them "they love makin' babies too" and continues with something that's purely obscene.
Reacting to it, US President Joe Biden said while on a campaign call on Tuesday, "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonisation of Latinos is unconscionable and unAmerican".
Trump dissociated himself from Hinchcliffe, telling ABC News, "I don't know him. Someone put him up there".
In an attempt to bail him out, one of Puerto Rico's top politicians Zoraido Buxo said they will not get shaken by it and endorsed Trump.
"We will not be shaken, we will not be moved by ignorance, foolishness or irrational carelessness, we will stay true to what truly matters," she said at Trump's rally Tuesday evening in Allentown, a Latino majority city in Pennsylvania.
Speaking in both English and Spanish, she said her homeland was "a beautiful island, where I was born and raised, indeed a community very well anchored with steadfast conservative values of family, faith, economic freedom, and deep love of country".
The Caribbean island of Puerto Rico was ceded to the US by Spain when it lost the Spanish-US War in 1898 but was never integrated into the US.
It has a strange status because Puerto Ricans are American citizens who can vote in US elections if they live on the mainland, but not if they are on the island, which has its own legislatures.
Buxo is the island's "shadow senator" because, although she has been elected by the island as its senator, she cannot sit and vote in the US Senate since the territory is not constitutionally a US state.
Pennsylvania's Latino population is slightly over 8 per cent and their votes can swing the results in the state where Trump and Vice President Harris are virtually tied.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio said on the social media platform X, "Puerto Rico isn't trash, it's our fellow American citizens who've made incredible contributions to this country".
"That's not Trump's words, that's Hinchcliffe's words," he declared of the insult comedian.
According to Trump's campaign, Hinchcliffe's speech had been vetted and the insults to Puerto Ricans were not on it and he had diverted from the text to make the insults.
The campaign sources said that Hinchcliffe's original draft had included a vulgar insult against Harris, which he was ordered to omit.
Harris dismissed the insult to Puerto Ricans as "nonsense," and welcomed the support of two prominent entertainers of that ancestry, Jennifer "JayLo" Lopez and Bad Bunny.
Hinchcliffe also hurled insults at African Americans, Palestinians, and Jewish people.
Trump, who has flung insults at various communities, with Haitians his latest victims, has cut back on it in the final days of the campaign.
At his Sunday rally, he tried to reach as broad as possible, as if he were building the "biggest, broadest coalition in the history of the country".
"We bleed the same blood. We share the same hope. We are one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God," he said.
This last attempt at outreach, however, was unraveled by Hinchcliffe and other speakers using derogatory language that branded Harris as a woman of sex and race.
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