Bad Bunny could spell bad news for Trump

You can slice the US electorate up a hundred ways to infer political consequences from pre-election events (see Musk above).

But the moment the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s New York rally on Sunday might come back to haunt them both.

There are nearly 500,000 Puerto Ricans in the key state of Pennsylvania. The Trump campaign issued a rare statement distancing itself from the comment, and it was followed by Bad Bunny throwing his support behind Kamala Harris on Instagram.

The Puerto Rican rapper was the most streamed artist on Spotify in three of the past four years. He has 45 million followers on Instagram (including a huge fan base of young voters), and is a political lodestar to many Latinos.

In August, a Democratic consultant said an endorsement from him would be a “game-over moment”. There’s no way to know if this is true until 5 November. But choosing Hinchcliffe as a warm-up act was an unforced error.