‘We carved watermelons together’: Black people are targeted by racist ‘joke’ at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally

As part of a car-crash of a display that former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci likened to “1933 Germany,” comedian Tony Hinchcliffe targeted a Black audience member with a racist “joke” about “carving watermelons” during Sunday’s Trump rally at Madison Square Garden.

Hinchcliffe pointed to a man in the audience before saying: “That’s cool, Black guy with a thing on his head. What the hell is that, a lampshade? Look at this guy! Oh, my goodness. Wow! I’m just kidding; that’s one of my buddies. He had a Halloween party last night. We had fun; we carved watermelons together. It was awesome!”

The racist remark came during an evening filled with inflammatory rhetoric that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez characterized as a “hate rally” rather than a typical campaign event. “These are mini January 6 rallies, these are mini Stop the Steal rallies,” she said on Morning Joe.

The irony reached new heights when Rep. Byron Donalds, a Black Republican from Florida, attempted to defend the rally on CNBC’s Squawk Box Monday morning. “Is it a racist rally if you have a Black man from Florida who’s originally from New York speaking at the rally? I don’t think so,” Donalds argued while simultaneously distancing himself from Hinchcliffe’s comments as if there was a way to cleave them from his surrogacy of Trump’s platform.

“I didn’t agree with what the comedian said. None of us did,” Donalds insisted. “When it came out, we were all like, ‘Wait what? Who? Did that get out? No, no, no.'”

Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared that “America is for Americans only,” while Trump himself mocked critics of his “enemy within” rhetoric – demonstrating how the campaign’s inflammatory messaging has moved from subtext to center stage with just eight days until the election.

Now, the kicker is in other videos from the Madison Square Garden rally, including one that revealed an incredibly pointed moment of racist symbolism: “Dixie“—the Confederate anthem that originated in 1850s blackface minstrel shows as an ode to plantation life—played before Donalds took the stage. To play this slavery-era song before the only Black Republican congressman’s speech was a choice to say the least. Teamed with Hinchcliffe’s joke, the purposeful embarrassment of Donalds appears clear with intentional punctuation. He also came out, ironically, to John Cena’s wrestling entrance song, “The Time is Now.” It is ironic because, like John Cena’s wrestling persona, the crowd does not see his Blackness, so they definitely do not see his humanity in connection to it.

It gains additional context from Rep. Chip Roy’s earlier admission that Donalds’ nomination for House Speaker was specifically because Republicans “needed a Black man” to oppose Rep. Hakeem Jeffries. The calculated staging—from Hinchcliffe’s racist “jokes” to the loaded musical selection—exposed how the rally’s organizers weaponized both overt racism and coded symbolism for their base, though perhaps to a detriment.