The New York Times
MIAMI — Carmen Yulín Cruz’s cellphone started buzzing on Sunday while she was at the airport in Connecticut, waiting for a flight to Puerto Rico. A standup comic at former President Donald Trump’s rally in New York had called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
As video clips of the comic, Tony Hinchcliffe, began flashing on airport televisions, fellow Puerto Ricans preparing to board their flight began erupting, Cruz said.
“People were asking me, ‘Mira, Yulín, what is this guy saying?’ — only in more colorful language,” Cruz, the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, said on Monday. “And I said: ‘Well, this isn’t the first time. Let’s not be surprised.’”
As president, Trump fought bitterly with Cruz and other Puerto Rican leaders, and resisted sending billions of dollars in aid after the territory was ravaged by back-to-back hurricanes in 2017. He made angry comments on social media and tossed paper towels at Puerto Ricans during a visit that few, if any, have forgotten. He even wondered privately if the United States could sell the island.
“It’s just another day in Trump world,” Marcos Vilar, a Puerto Rican who is the executive director of Alianza for Progress, a Latino advocacy group in Florida, said at a news conference on Monday in Kissimmee, a heavily Puerto Rican city south of Orlando.
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