Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t hold back when asked about Donald Trump’s recent campaign event at Madison Square Garden, calling the controversial event a “hate rally.”
“This was a hate rally. This was not just a presidential rally. This was also not just a campaign rally. I think it’s important for people to understand that these are mini Jan. 6 rallies. These are mini Stop the Steal rallies,” Ocasio-Cortez said on MSNBC Monday morning.
The New York representative went on to claim that the true purpose of these rallies is to “prime an electorate into rejecting the results of an election if it doesn’t go the way that they want.” She also said that Trump and everyone who was present at Sunday’s event “do not respect the law of the United States of America and they either want to win this election or they are using rhetoric of taking it by force.”
Ocasio-Cortez, whose family is Puerto Rican, was brought on to discuss the controversial statements made at the New York City event. During the rally, comedian and podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage,” a comment that drew immediate backlash from Democrats and several Republicans.
“That is what they mean, and that is what they’re doing when they are inciting violence and hatred against Latinos, against Black Americans, against Americans that don’t have children,” she continued. ” We have to understand how unhinged this campaign has gotten. The only reason the rhetoric has gotten this far is precisely because they’re trying to prime the kind of froth that led up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.”
Ocasio-Cortez also said that the campaign is “scrambling” in the wake of Hinchcliffe’s comment. “They knew exactly who was going to say what before they went on. The only backtracking that they’re doing right now is just because tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans happen to live in Philadelphia, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and the several swing states that happen to run through the state of New York,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They’re just realizing they might have made a big error by saying out loud what they’re thinking.”
This isn’t the first time AOC has publicly responded to the comment Hinchcliffe during Sunday night’s Trump rally. Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic nominee for vice president Tim Walz described the speech as “terrifying, absolutely wild times” in a video posted to X. Several celebrities have also responded to the remarks, including Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny and Ricky Martin.
In the aftermath of the joke, the Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from Hinchcliffe. “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” Danielle Alvarez, a Trump campaign senior advisor, told the Wall Street Journal. However, the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reposted Hinchcliffe’s defense of the offensive material.
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