‘Wanna go halfsies?’: Buried tweets from Trump’s speaker pick crawl out, and they’re as repulsive as you’d expect
It’s time to talk about Tony Hinchcliffe. This so-called comedian was a speaker at Donald Trump’s now infamous Madison Square Garden rally, and he was so offensive he might genuinely have hurt Trump’s election chances.
Hinchcliffe’s most reported-on “joke” at the rally was, “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.” Puerto Ricans were rightly outraged and even Republicans slammed the comedian for racism. Everyone knows now what a horrible person Hinchcliffe is.
But whoever booked him for the rally should have known that already. Hinchcliffe was openly racist and ableist on his X, formerly known as Twitter, account. He also made headlines back in 2021 for a vile attack on Asian comedian Peng Dang. PatriotTakes has the video and some appalling language is used.
Dang was hurt and shocked. “Tony never came up to me, talked to me or apologized. I don’t think he thinks that was offensive,” he told USA Today. But it was highly offensive, and led to Hinchcliffe being dropped by the WME agency.
Hinchcliffe is one of those comedians who believes insults and cruelty are funny. The historical tweet that caught attention first is a crude joke about slavery. Hinchcliffe tweeted in 2011, before the Trump presidential campaign, “Anyone want to go halfsies on a slave?” That’s the entire joke. There’s no punchline, nothing funny about it whatsoever.
The “slave” tweet has since been deleted, but PatriotTakes had a screenshot, and a long list of Hinchcliffe’s most offensive tweets. Another tweet from 2011 reads “Exciting news guys: If what I just heard is true then all black people are going to be history next month!! #NotRacist.” It had very little engagement up until now—even 2011 Twitter didn’t think Hinchcliffe was funny. Even 9/11 wasn’t off limits for Hinchcliffe as long as he got the chance to be racist. On the eleventh anniversary of the tragedy Hinchcliffe made a nasty joke about Black people.
Hinchcliffe also showed appalling ableism. In 2010 (a time when ableism was far more acceptable in comedy, which will forever be disgusting) he tweeted, “I bet the best part of having a r*tarded child is not having to buy it Christmas gifts.” Again, there’s no joke here, just cruelty. What sort of person calls a child, even a hypothetical one, an “it”? His ableism extended to saying Helen Keller, a woman who accomplished much more than people like Hinchcliffe ever will, would have been a “perfect abortion.”
After the Madison Square Garden rally everyone is informed about what a horrible person Hinchcliffe is. But he continues to deny he’s done anything wrong. He wrote on X, in response to a clip of Tim Walz and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez condemning his “joke.”
That last bit of nastiness there is a reference to Tim Walz giving students menstruation products. Why anyone would consider that worthy of an insult is a mystery to all normal people. All we can do now is hope that Hinchcliffe is for the rest of his life treated the same way that he treats others.
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