How Trump kept Biden’s ‘garbage’ gaffe alive

By
SENIOR CONTRIBUTOR
-
55

By SUSAN CRABTREE | REAL CLEAR WIRE

As the White House tried to clean up President Biden’s mess, Donald Trump waited – you couldn’t say patiently.

“Just to clarify,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Wednesday before fielding another half dozen questions about the fiasco, Biden “was not calling Trump supporters garbage.” She pointed to his statement posted on social media, his longstanding reputation for empathy, his oft-stated desire to lower the temperature.

“He does not view Trump supporters, or anybody who supports Trump as ‘garbage,’” Jean-Pierre asserted on a day the White House preferred to talk about good economic news or really anything else. After an hour, she hoped that what Republicans gleefully were calling “Garbage-gate” was over.

Then Trump landed in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He wore an orange vest, walked to a white garbage truck, and climbed into the passenger’s seat. “How do you like my garbage truck?” he asked reporters. “This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden.”

“I have to begin by saying, 250 million Americans are not garbage,” Trump said to open his Wisconsin rally as he walked on stage still wearing the Hi-Vis vest. Every major paper of record covered the stunt (though the press dutifully noted that he vastly overstated his support). The Internet went wild. Less than a week before the election, the garbage gaffe ripened. Trump had a feeling this would work.

A source close to the former president told RealClearPolitics that Trump came up with the idea while flipping between Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech on the Ellipse and a recording of Biden trying to denounce comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s tasteless joke at Madison Square Garden. The insult comic called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.” Biden brought up the bit during a call with Hispanic voters Tuesday but ended up saying “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

The former president made a plan that very night. “It was all Donald Trump,” a senior campaign advisor told RCP. The next day, the garbage truck was waiting for him in Wisconsin. The implicit argument: Just like Hillary Clinton had infamously denounced Trump supporters as “deplorables,” Biden had just called them “garbage.” The White House disputes this characterization, of course, but the Trump campaign feels confident they have turned trash to treasure.

“Totally viral,” the advisor said of how the stunt was playing.

It was also a return to form for the former president. Reasoned Brad Parscale, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing; if you’re entertaining, you’re winning.” During a recent Frontline interview, the former Trump campaign manager said that the reason he won in 2016, the reason he defeated Clinton, was because “Trump stopped being the explainer.” The garbage truck stunt followed the McDonald’s moment when the former president worked as a fry cook during a photo-op meant to call into question the Harris claim that she worked at that fast-food establishment in her youth.

Democrats were quick to point out that Trump is hardly blameless. He belittles his opponents with ease and has made a crusade against an ill-defined group that he calls “the enemy within” a hallmark of his campaign. On Wednesday, the anti-Trump Lincoln Project circulated a clip of the Republican at a Wisconsin rally in September insulting the Harris camp with similar language to words Biden allegedly used. “It’s the people that surround her, they’re scum and they want to take down our country,” Trump said of the vice president and her allies, not her supporters. “They are absolute garbage.”

For her part, the vice president tried to distance herself from Biden. “First of all,” she explained earlier on Wednesday, “he clarified his comments but let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.” It was another mess, an unforced error, that the incumbent president had hoisted on her, and it fit a larger pattern.

While Joe Biden lives out the final days of his presidency, he keeps causing headaches. Before this fiasco, Biden’s praise of Ron DeSantis during hurricane season complicated Harris’ criticism of Florida’s Republican governor. The garbage gaffe calls to mind a warning that former President Barack Obama reportedly shared in private: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to [mess] things up.”

While capable of touching displays of empathy, Biden has never been shy about his antipathy toward his opponents. He said Republicans who opposed mask mandates displayed “neanderthal thinking,”argued that their agenda was “semi-fascist,” and compared lawmakers who opposed his voting reform bill to racists segregationists like Bill Connor and Jefferson Davis.

And reporters are not immune from his characterizations: The president infamously referred to one Fox News correspondent as “a stupid son of a bitch.” He later apologized.

October surprise: CDC says McDonald’s quarter-pounders are sickening people, and Biden says to lock Trump in jail

Often when Biden speaks off-the-cuff,  the White House damage-control crews are dispatched to clean things up. Ahead of the midterm elections, for instance, Biden told RCP that he believed the election “easily could be illegitimate.” The next morning, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the president was saying the opposite. At other times, Biden has seemingly endorsed regime change in Russia and deviated from decades of the so-called One China policy.

International controversy ensued, and each time, the White House walked back the comments. If Trump gets his way, they won’t have time to walk back his latest gaffe before the election.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

55 COMMENTS

      • Just that sentence sums up his supporters though: They think he’s a billionaire that would share air with them.

    • Such a catchy phrase–the people’s billionaire! Why, it has a nicer ring to it than the dictatorship of the proletariat. I hope your billionaire gives you the handout you’re browning around for, and at least you’re more classy in bumming those who work the streets.

      • Edit: “[A]t least you’re more classy in bumming than those who work the streets.”

  2. She can put her best Bobblehead performance but that still does not change what he said and that I heard with my lying eyes.

  3. The retraction of Biden’s statement only solidifies what Americans already know about Joe Biden:
    .
    He’s a POS.

  4. Been called worse.
    These politicians will see and do anything to get elected. You wonder why they put up with so much stuff in life it’s all about the money in the power.

    • A quick replay of Hunter Biden’s laptop deemed “Russian misinformation” by 50 of America’s finest will freshen everyone’s memory of what can happen when a crack addict receives excess free money using his daddy’s power as VP under the “watchful” eyes of Barak Obama’s 8 years of “change”.

  5. It’s just little things to remember be it an election or just day to day life. President Biden didn’t misspeak. He spoke the truth. This is what the left thinks of anyone not on their program.

    I take it as an insult. At this stage it’s all insults. It’s nice that they just laid it all out in the open. Most of us have known it all along anyway.

    Now, let’s deal with the assembly…..

  9. Absolutely brilliant trolling by Trump, made more effective by being one of the funniest things I’ve seen since he worked at McDonalds last weekend. Cheers –

  11. Aren’t we all proud of the sophistication of our political discourse nowadays? The rest of the world is laughing at us, and the Founding Fathers would be so pleased…

  12. Saul Alinsky ‘Rules for Radicals’: Always accuse your opponents for doing what you are doing.

    Therefore, Democrats proved they are deplorable, Nazi garbage. Go Trump!

    • I’m a Republican and have voted and donated as such my entire life and I am ashamed at what a circus Trump brings. He’s a loser, the least of his family and only idiots love him.

      • Ah yes… Another republican that is uninterested in policy, results, or outcomes. More interested in personality. Because running the Executive Branch of the Federal Government should assigned to a “nice guy.”
        .
        Go ahead and vote against Trump. You are voting for the WEF globalist agenda. If you think being overrun by people who do not support American ideals, if you think decimating our energy system, if you think living in 15 minute cities and asking for permission to travel is a good thing, go ahead, vote against Trump.
        .
        Seriously, tell me. Since 1988, what administration did anything that did not support globalization? What administration did not diminish the USA’s standing as a global superpower? There was one. I will give you a hint. It was the one run by the “loser” you are knocking.

          • Yet, every action Reagan took solidified our position as a superpower.
            .
            And, even if we have to “unite” why does that mean we should subordinate ourselves to the leftists? There is uniting as equals, and surrendering. Your favorite warmongers, the Bush family, cut us down on the world stage, and 0bama deliberately and knowingly surrendered our place at the table.
            .
            Equals is where we unite and remain a soverign country. What the democrats are pushing for is subservience, not equality. And, you apparently are supporting it.

  14. I remember in 2020 when Biden said he was going to be a President for all Americans. Given his public history, I doubted he could pull that off.
    Then he gave that speech in front of Freedom Hall, and confirmed my doubts. This further confirms it. As the “leader” of the Democrat party, it is obvious that he, and likely most of the leftists, abhor anyone who does not conform to their ideals.
    .
    Remember when voting. Who openly admits they despise you? Vote accordingly.

  15. The little bobble head muppet who is Biden’s press secretary, is not capable of telling a truth, even accidentally.
    She lies 100% of the time.

  16. Every soul on earth is born in a fallen state; rotten to the core with sin. That includes Biden, Harris, Trump, Vance, all politicians. As hard as it is to believe, even a newborn baby is not innocent. Once these facts are understood then the world as we see it makes sense. That said, what makes Trump the lesser of two evils is his life experience. He was shaped by the realistic, competitive, crucible of the hard-ball business world. He understands intrinsically how things work in reality and can deal with them compassionately. Harris, on the other hand, was shaped by the unrealistic, detached, soft-ball world of government bureaucracy. She has never had to make a payroll. She is defined by her feelings and ambitions with little true understanding how things work outside of government. Best of luck to all of us if we elect her.

  17. I will never forget the young lady that asked Joe Biden about one of his policy statements during the 2020 Democratic primary and He flat out called her a “lying dog faced pony soldier”…..
    And then He went on to win the primary.

    After that exchange of insults I would expect nothing less of the “child hair sniffer”.

  18. When Trump loses this time will he finally go away like he promised in 2020? He lost but he just can’t seem to go away. He’s going to be a 3 time popular vote loser, and 2 time electoral college loser. Time for the Trump Trash to come by and pick up the Trump Crime Family and haul them off to Riker’s Island!

  20. I remember one of the Sunday funnies from when I was a kid. Maybe it was from a comic book as well. I don’t remember some particular details but two things I recall about Richy Rich was his haircut and sense of ignorant entitlement and an industrious caretaking woman who may have been a nanny or a housekeeper or the original half-human half-robot household slave and how uncharacteristic her name of Irona seemed. But, here we are, a live overgrown Richy Rich bully-boy and his side-kick in the funny papers “irony”. If there was any of that pulpy fish wrapper around, it would make a useful firestarter for the season’s first major snow.

  21. MAGA’s righteous indignation over Biden’s (stupid) comment is the height of hypocrisy. Trump and his surrogates have called his opponents countless names and filled the internet with “mean tweets”. But Biden calls MAGA garbage and y’all lose your minds.

    Do you actually take yourselves seriously?

  23. If you attacked Kamala Harris for the way she laughs but you’re voting for the guy pretending to perform a sex act on his microphone live on stage, congratulations, you are an idiot who’s in a cult.

Comments are closed.