Reggaeton star Nicky Jam walked back his previous endorsement of former President Trump Wednesday in the wake of fallout over a poorly received joke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday.
In an Instagram post in Spanish, the singer born Nick Rivera Caminero explained he had endorsed Trump for his economic proposals, with “[Trump] being a businessman, I thought it was the best move.”
“Never in my life did I think that a month later a comedian would come to criticize my country, to speak poorly of my country, and therefore I renounce any support to Donald Trump and move aside from any political situation. Puerto Rico se respeta, Nicky Jam,” he said.
The Trump campaign has spent the past three days trying to contain damage following comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke at the rally, where he equated Puerto Rico to floating garbage.
Although Trump claims not to have heard the joke and his campaign has disavowed it, many Puerto Rican voters, including a healthy crop of public figures, are livid over the slur and the lack of a direct apology from Trump.
“We’re seeing it on the ground. Obviously it started on social media but from there it caught fire,” said Michael Toledo, executive director of the Centro Hispano Daniel Torres in Reading, Pa.
The fracas threatens to shift Pennsylvania, an all important swing state, toward Vice President Harris.
Hispanic, and particularly Puerto Rican, voters along the Highway 222 corridor, also known as the Latino Corridor, are a key demographic in a state that’s tied in most polls.
At a Tuesday rally in Allentown, Pa., the northern end of the Latino Corridor, Trump did not directly address the offending joke, but he said “nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rican community more than I do.”
According to Toledo, the dissatisfaction with the handling of the joke has spread well beyond the Puerto Rican community.
“This is not just a Puerto Rican issue. All Latinos across the board have taken offense to this,” he said.
The final-week twist has been played up by Democrats, though it somewhat overshadowed Harris’s final campaign speech at the White House Ellipse — and set the stage for President Biden to muddy the waters with a gaffe.
Speaking on a call with Voto Latino, Biden appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage” in response to Hinchcliffe’s joke, but the White House later tried to clarify that Biden was criticizing the “demonization of Latinos” by Trump supporters, not the supporters themselves.
Trump on Wednesday picked up on Biden’s words, telling supporters at a rally “they’ve treated you like garbage.”
