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.
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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 b****.” He later apologized.
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.
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