Former president Donald Trump and his MAGA allies pounced Tuesday night after President Joe Biden appeared to call the Republican nominee’s supporters “garbage,” hoping to engineer a backlash similar to 2016 when Hillary Clinton dubbed them “deplorables.”
Biden made the comment while on a video call with Voto Latino, a voter registration group for Hispanic and Latino Americans.
He was referencing remarks by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who performed at Trump’s obscene MAGA carnival in New York City on Sunday, where speakers called Trump‘s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, the “Antichrist” and deliberately misstated her ethnic background as “Samoan-Malaysian.”
Hinchcliffe drew widespread condemnation—including from Republican lawmakers—for calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.”
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters—his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American,” Biden said on the call.
After Anderson Cooper played the clip on his CNN show, his guest Victor Martinez—a host for Pennsylvania Spanish-language radio station La Mega who has criticized the Trump campaign’s response to Hinchcliffe’s bigoted remarks—said Biden wasn’t helping.
“Those were strong words and I don‘t agree that we should call Trump supporters trash, either,” he said. “That’s not right.”
The Trump team, meanwhile, went into overdrive after Biden’s remarks were broadcast, sending out a blast to the media highlighting coordinated responses by Ohio Senator and Trump running mate JD Vance, Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Trump’s eldest child, Donald Jr.
Vance called the remark “disgusting” and accused Biden of “attacking half the country.”
Trump’s team was clearly hoping to provoke a similar backlash to Clinton’s 2016 remarks—she actually claimed that “half” of his supporters, not all of them, fell into a “basket of deplorables” during his first run for office.
Her words were used to stir up enthusiasm and outrage among Trump’s MAGA base, painting the entire movement as aggrieved victims of Democratic scorn.
Speaking to supporters at a rally in Pennsylvania Tuesday, Trump called Biden‘s “garbage” remark “worse” than Clinton’s name for some of his supporters.
The Trump campaign also used Biden’s remark to ramp up its efforts to tie his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, to her unpopular boss.
Biden’s standing with voters is deep underwater, as recent polls show roughly 39 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s doing and 55 percent disapprove.
Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt called on Harris, to “answer for this disgraceful attack on tens of millions of Americans.”
In the fallout, the White House scrambled to clarify—or obscure—Biden’s remarks.
They rushed out a transcript where they inserted an apostrophe into Biden’s words and combined two sentence fragments—possibly even two sentences—that he clearly paused between in order to argue Biden was talking about Trump’s “demonization of Latinos.”
When Axios asked a White House spokesperson if staff bothered to actually speak to Biden about what he meant before issuing the transcript, they refused to answer on the record. The spokesperson later claimed staff did speak to him, though refused to offer any details.
Biden insisted, in a tweeted statement, that he was referring to the “hateful rhetoric” at Trump’s rally.
The president has a long history of blunders that rivals any politician in U.S. history, even acknowledging in 2019 that he is a “gaffe machine.”
The Harris campaign has kept him at a distance, even avoiding events with him because they believe he is a liability, Axios reported this week.
