Korean here. Bring it on! We actually love making puns out of people's names. Our own media do it all the time. Some of those puns might be offensive in one way or another, but that has nothing to do with racism in general. Our language and naming conventions just happen to be perfect for multilingual punning and we know it. :)

I’m not convinced racist jokes are okay just because the subject of the joke is a criminal.

I'd say innocent until proven guilty. Outlawing people without a fair trial is barbaric. But I think the pun isn't too bad.

What I find offensive is indeed the rhyming without consideration of what it means in the source language. I find myself not too sensitive or PC, if my name was “Lecoq” (or if I had an Asian friend named “Phuk”) I would of course find it okay if an English speaker had an innocent giggle, but not if they took that more seriously and wrote that down as a public joke to shame me.

Now that you bring it’s maybe a cultural difference because I can’t really remember the last time I saw or heard a pun on a politician name in the news, even of opposite sides. Making fun of someone family name is of very poor taste and is not something you will find in public. So I guess my gut reaction as a French seeing a pun on family name (not okay in the first place) + foreign sounding name was it’s racist, because honestly only real racists could attempt that here. I know that sound maybe too sensitive which is quite paradoxical because I usually find Americans generally way more PC on these subjects than us.

Edit: for more cultural background I think maybe it’s because there are common French family names literally translating as “Thefat”, “Chicken”, “Myass”, “Thegay”, “Sausage”, “Thewhite”… so it’s learned early in school to be respectful of others names.