Vice President Kamala Harris was quick to distance herself Wednesday from comments made by President Joe Biden that appeared to liken supporters of her Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump, to “garbage.”
“I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for,” Harris said, in a statement to reporters. “You heard my speech last night. I believe the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not. I will be a President for all Americans.”
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During a video call with voter registration group Voto Latino on Tuesday, Biden referenced a widely condemned, hateful jab by a speaker at a Trump rally who called 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,” he said.
Trump and a horde of MAGA fixtures and hanger-ons swarmed in response, trying to drum up a scandal on par with 2016 when Hillary Clinton called some of Trump’s supporter’s “deplorables.”
Ironically, Trump’s running mate JD Vance, who one day earlier said Americans shouldn’t get “offended at every little thing” to dismiss the hateful comments at Trump’s rally, was among those to profess outrage.
The White House, meanwhile, scrambled to try and reframe Biden’s remarks, offering up a transcript that added in an apostrophe and tried to run his “garbage” comment into his following point, even as video of Biden contradicted their smokescreen efforts.
Harris noted that Biden had “clarified” his comments before giving her own response.
Biden tweeted that he intended only to address the “hateful rhetoric” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday.
The rally featured extreme attacks on Harris—one speaker called her the “Antichrist” while conservative firebrand Tucker Carlson falsely branded her a “Samoan-Malaysian“—and multiple racist failed joke attempts by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who made the widely condemned ”garbage” remark about Puerto Rico.
Trump himself has a long-standing history of bigoted and racist rhetoric aimed at people of Latin heritage and migrants from Latin American countries.
