Kamala Harris is distancing herself today from Joe Biden’s “garbage” gaffe amid a very close election race, but the White House is insisting it’s all about the apostrophe.
“Just to clarify, he was not calling Trump supporters garbage,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at the top of Wednesday briefing as the blast radius from Biden’s comment on a campaign Zoom call last night continued to grow and attract scorn from the likes of Donald Trump. “He does not view Trump supporters or anybody who supports Trump as garbage.”
For a politician who has made verbal stumbles part of his brand, Biden may have stepped over his preferred successor’s final pitch to voters by getting caught in the ‘he said, he really said’ quicksand.
As the VP was wrapping up her well received speech on Tuesday night to around 70,000 supporters across the street from the White House, Biden was inside talking to VoteLatino. On that call, the incumbent addressed the widely criticized derogatory remarks that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage” by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at the October 27 MAGAfest in NYC’s Madison Square Garden.
“They’re good, decent, honorable people,” a somewhat halting POTUS said of Puerto Ricans on Tuesday. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters …his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
Biden quickly tried to walk his comment back and put out a clarification tweet on it. As well the administration released a transcript that had the comment as “supporter’s,” not “supporters,” to spotlight Hinchcliffe.
No matter, the response was swift and harsh from the often insulting and foul-mouthed Trump and other Republicans. Earlier today, in damage control mode, Harris said: “Listen, I think, first of all, he clarified his comments, but let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”
The badly timed remarks by Biden dominated most of the news cycle overnight and deep into Wednesday with less than a week until Election Day.
Eyes on the close polls, Vice President Harris put some distance between herself and the president several times today. “Listen, I think, first of all, he clarified his comments, but let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for,” the VP said on the tarmac next to Air Force 2 before starting a barnstorming of battleground states Wednesday. Off-stage at a campaign rally later on, Harris repeated the remarks in an interview with ABC News that is set to run in full on World News Tonight later today – – which the network offered a preview of this afternoon.
Seeking to regain traction after the VP’s strong Ellipse speech and gain his own version of a moral high ground, Trump mocked both Biden and Harris with “you can’t lead America, if you don’t love Americans” at a North Carolina rally.
Of course, even if Trump avoided more “enemy within” comments and declared that he “isn’t Hitler,” it is hard to turn the tables when the GOP candidate then went on to call Harris “a low IQ person” and Democrats “low lifes.” Falling back into his usual list of sleights, Trump spent a lot of time today mispronouncing the VP’s name and going on and on in front of his North Carolina supporters about how great he was in the September 10 debate with Harris, a match-up he was widely seen as losing. Trump today also praised the “superior people” of his followers, and reiterated the lies that FEMA did nothing for hurricane relief, and how the 2020 was stolen from him.
Still, there is no doubt the White House were trying to move Heaven and Earth to bury Biden’s own garbage remarks.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 30, 2024.
“So look, the President wanted to clarify because he understood that …what he was saying was to being taken out of context,” Jean-Pierre stated Wednesday before the White Houser press corp. “So, he wanted to be very, very clear about what he was trying to say, Jean-Pierre added.
“He was talking about hateful rhetoric, and we’ve called out hateful rhetoric from here, we have,” the Press Secretary continued. “Obviously this hateful rhetoric was about a particular community, …the Puerto Rican community. They’re Americans. These are (a) community that he respects, and he wanted to make sure he called that out. And hateful rhetoric should be called out. It should be. But at the same time, the President is a president for all he will continue to do so. He will continue to serve for everyone.”
As Republicans piled on Biden’s comment from last night, there was occasional pushback against the kettle black situation of it all
“I do wonder if you hold the same standard you describe for former President Trump, because he has used all sorts of language to talk about Democrats, calling them ‘human scum,’” CNN’s Boris Sanchez asked Rep. Marcus Molinaro (R-NY) this morning of the litany of the ex-POTUS’ insults, trying to frame the larger context of the deterioration of political discourse in America in the Trump Era.
I call balls and strikes,” the Congressman replied, straddling the bipartisan fence. “Every American’s worthy of a government that respects them.”
