Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” show Monday and skillfully reduced Donald Trump’s Nazi-inspired rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday. 

"This was not just a presidential rally. This was also not just a campaign rally,” Ocasio-Cortez explained. “I think it's very important for people to understand that these are mini Jan. 6 rallies. These are mini Stop the Steal rallies. These are rallies to prime an electorate into rejecting the results of an election if it doesn't go the way that they want.” 

I mean, you have JD Vance literally talking about watering down people's right to vote, depending on if they can viably carry a child or not,” Ocasio-Cortez said, pointing to the low bar of sanity in the Trump campaign. “We have to understand how unhinged this campaign has gotten. And the only reason that their rhetoric has gotten this far is precisely because they are trying to prime the kind of froth that led up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol."

Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made the biggest headlines at the MSG rally, after his truly unfunny act, in which he called Puerto Rico “literally a floating island of garbage,” went viral. The naked insult to millions of Puerto Ricans led to celebrities like Bad Bunny and Ricky Martin to respond by publicly endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris while castigating Trump. Right-wing pundits and politicians everywhere are now scrambling to deflect from the inherent racism of Trump’s Nazi rally by simply dismissing it as a joke.

"Right now the campaign is scrambling, and they're trying to blame this rhetoric on a so-called comedian. This is not a comedian. This is the Trump campaign,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “They invited this rhetoric on their stage for a reason. It was a chorus of speakers on that campaign for a reason. It was vetted and they knew exactly who was going to say what before they went on.”

“The only backtracking that they're doing right now, is just because tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans happen to live in Philadelphia, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “And also the several swing seats in the House in the end, in the House of Representatives that run through the state of New York." 

Ocasio-Cortez was clear to detail that the preponderance of junk polling and fabricated claims of ballot burning are all a part of this systematic disinformation campaign by the right to undermine our upcoming elections. And we know what the end game is: Accomplishing what Trump failed to do on Jan. 6, 2021—reinstalling himself over our democratically elected president.

“All of this is exactly a replay of what Donald Trump did on Jan. 6. We don't have to think about if this is what happens,” Ocasio-Cortez told MSNBC viewers. “This is their playbook that they have used that led to the deaths of multiple people on Jan. 6. This led to one of the largest attacks in American history on the American Capitol, on U.S. soil."

Republished with permission from Daily Kos.