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Confirmed: The MSG Rally Joke 'Scandal' Was a Media Invention That Voters Didn't Care About at All

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  November 11, 2024 2:05 PM

With just days remaining in the presidential election, Donald Trump held a mini-convention-style rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City.  Based on the resulting media coverage, you'd think that the most newsworthy and electorally-relevant thing that happened at the event was an insult comic making a bad joke about Puerto Rico as a warm-up act in the pre-show.  This was a serious problem for Trump, we were told, as it could turn Puerto Rican pockets of voters away from supporting him, especially in a key region of Pennsylvania.  It could also have the spillover effect of offending Hispanics more broadly, they informed us.  Democrats leaned heavily into this narrative, naturally, claiming that it was a big reason Kamala Harris had the "momentum" heading into Election Day.  

At the time, I wrote that while it was a dumb idea to put a comedian whose schtick is literally insulting large groups of people onstage at a political gathering, but shoved back pretty forcefully against the deeply silly notion (in my view) that this was significant "news," or an election mover at all.  Nevertheless, much of the political press treated it like it was the lead national story for several days.  Now that the dust has settled, how is their insistent coverage looking?  Well, it's looking like preposterous wish-casting.  They were trying to convince themselves and others of a reality that simply did not exist -- and the people who were supposed to be very upset over a comedian's joke...just were not.  Here's what happened in a heavily Puerto Rican county in Florida:


Trump flipped it by a point-and-a-half, once all the votes were tabulated.  And this is what happened in that aforementioned part of battleground Pennsylvania:


And in Puerto Rico itself:


As for the claimed "momentum" for Harris -- with Trump's campaign reportedly faltering, and the candidate in "meltdown" over the final days -- how did that turn out?

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Trump won voters who made their decision in the final week of the campaign by 12 percentage points. They were wrong about everything. And the 'Nazi' rally, or whatever, was just as diverse as Trump's historic victory coalition.  Many journalists were emphasizing some stupid joke over major developments like the worst jobs report in four years, and the terrorist attack in Chicago by a Harris-era illegal immigrant.  They talked incessantly about what they hoped would matter, rather than what actually mattered to voters.  They put their fist on the scale, then learned that their biased interference was an exercise in impotence.  I'll leave you with a few statistics and factoids about the election result so many members of the 'news' media tried hard to prevent:


Yes, in the history of the United States of America, Donald Trump has received more combined votes for president than anyone else, ever. And here's one journalist -- Jan Crawford of CBS News, who also distinguished herself in another way recently -- who seems to get it: