By Philip Wegmann
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.”
The Government Controled Media dont want the truth to be known
Notice also that Robin Ware/Robert L. Peters/JRB Ware/Pedo Peter/idiot Biden did not, as the rest of the liars did, make an attempt to replace calling the island of Puerto Rico a pile of garbage (an actual documented fact) with calling all Puerto Ricans “garbage”. No, he made clear and correctly quoted Hinchcliffe’s joke that Puerto Rico was a pile of garbage, then went on to call all voters that do not support more failure and disaster in the name of DEI GARBAGE.
They no like Trumps Halloween outfit?
Joe called a democrat voter fat, and growled in a union workers face “I dont work for you”
He was never a nice guy, just the Big Guy, Pedo Pete.
joe took a real issue, Puerto Rico’s garbage problem, and expanded a joke about it into a criticism of ALL Hispanics!
Egypt used to have a huge Coptic Christian population, now killed, converted or exited.
The coptics were kept out of jobs, schools, everything.
So, they bought pigs and recycled Egypt’s garbage.
They collected glass, plastic and metals.
Their pigs ate the organic refuse.
It was a system that worked.
The Puerto Ricans have done none of that.
Their garbage piles rival those in the dystopian movie, Idiocracy.