'Frightening and awful': Morning Joe flags under-the-radar racism missed at Trump rally

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough flagged a remarkably racist remark made by a comedian at at Donald Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden that he said has seemingly flown under the radar.

Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage" and made insulting remarks about Black, Jewish , and Latino people, but the "Morning Joe" host was surprised one particular comment hadn't drawn as much scrutiny as others that prompted the Trump campaign to distance themselves from the comic.

"There were so many insults we haven't even gotten to the part where the speaker saw a Black man in the audience and made a watermelon joke," Scarborough said. "Usually that would stop the rally. People would say you need to get off the stage, they would apologize a hundred times over. Just don't, they just don't. Then they pretend they didn't hear the joke when you know they did."

None of the other speakers at the New York City rally spoke out against Hinchcliffe's comments, which have dominated coverage of the presidential campaign in its closing days.

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"You know, they get selectively deaf," said Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, "and they didn't hear what was said for six hours at that rally. It was – what an amazing and frightening and awful spectacle that was. Of course, the comic was terrible, but the whole thing, the vice president of the United States was called the antichrist. Another speaker said that Democrats needed to be slaughtered."

"I mean, it was absolutely beyond the pale, yet that's where we are now," Robinson added, "and so it is not only justified, but necessary and inevitable to compare that rally to the Nazi rally held [at Madison Square Garden] before World War II, and that should never be appropriate or necessary in American politics, and yet it is. It is, this is where Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have brought us."

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