“If he didn’t have nothing to do with it, what’s he doing in the garbage truck?

Let’s see how the damage control effort by the Trump campaign is going on the ground in Pennsylvania:

But Trump’s Puerto Rican critics have faulted him for failing to apologize or to condemn Hinchcliffe’s remarks right away while taking the podium.

“I specifically asked the audience, ‘OK, what about if Trump today, all of a sudden, decides to apologize … Would that be OK? Would you take that in consideration?’” Victor Martinez, host of a Spanish-language morning radio show popular throughout Pennsylvania, said on CNN on Tuesday. “Overwhelmingly, everybody was like, ‘Nope, too late.’”

Seeking to capitalize on the blowback Trump has gotten, the Harris campaign dispatched the vice president’s sister, Maya Harris, and Puerto Rican musical theater artist Lin-Manuel Miranda to rally Puerto Rican voters at the Puerto Rican Beneficial Society in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on Thursday. Harris is due to hold a rally in neighboring Allentown on Monday afternoon.

HuffPost spoke with several Puerto Rican voters outside of a CTown Supermarket on Bethlehem’s south side, across the street from the Puerto Rican Beneficial Society.

Nilsa Vega and Neidel Pacheco of Hellertown, a borough south of Bethlehem, both said they had never voted before, but Hinchcliffe’s remarks were the reason they planned to vote for Harris on Tuesday.

“That hit the spot right there,” Vega said. “They keep saying, ‘Oh, he’s only a comedian.’ It still hurts.”

Pacheco saw Trump’s decision to pose in a garbage truck at a campaign stop in Wisconsin the following day as an additional insult. “If he didn’t have nothing to do with it, what’s he doing in the garbage truck?” Pacheco asked.

The impact of the Comey letter was so devastating in large measure because it was the culmination of a campaign in which “EMAILS!” and “Clinton is extremely shady” were dominant narratives. Biden’s “garbage” comments, om the other hand, despite being over-covered relative to their relevance were not nearly as big a story as Hinchcliffe’s Nazipalozza “joke.” So while the kind of Extremely Online young Nazis who thought putting Hinchcliffe on the card was a great idea thought that the garbage truck stunt would amplify Biden’s “gaffe,” it was much more likely to remind people of Trump’s racism, especially since Trump clearly doesn’t think there was anything wrong with what Hinhcliffe said

As we recently discussed the other big reason the Comey letter hit so hard was that for once Trump was convinced to stay off Twitter and stick to his message, allowing the media’s consuming obsession with EMAILS! to do its work for the campaign. Needless to say that’s not happening this time:

what is going on here, folks? pic.twitter.com/q3yW7NqSJb— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 3, 2024

You never know but it’s hard to see the marginal electorate breaking late for Trump like it did in 2016 this time.

…as multiple commenters have noted, Trump also once again said he should have appointed himself dictator:

He wasn’t joking. pic.twitter.com/LJcICS1JSv— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 3, 2024