Donald Trump said Wednesday that President Joe Biden’s apparent reference to his supporters as “garbage” makes Hillary Clinton’s 2016 insult of his MAGA supporters look like “baby stuff.”
“Joe Biden finally said what he and Kamala really think of our supporters,” Trump said at a rally in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. “He called them garbage. And they mean it.”
The crowd booed before Trump reminded them of what his 2016 Democratic opponent thought of them.
ADVERTISEMENT
“That makes deplorables look like baby stuff, right” Trump said, referring to Clinton, who damaged her presidential bid when she said Trump supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables.”
“My response to Joe and Kamala is very simple: You can’t lead America if you don’t love Americans,” Trump said.
Speculation has already mounted that Biden may have damaged Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ prospects with his “garbage” comment as badly as Clinton’s nail-in-the-coffin “deplorables” insult.
During a Latino voter outreach video call Tuesday night, Biden defended the Puerto Rican community against Trump’s Latino-bashing Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, when comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
“They’re good, decent, honorable people,” Biden said. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
The White House late Tuesday night went into spin mode, releasing a transcript of Biden’s remarks intended to clean up the mess. The transcript included an apostrophe in the word “supporter’s” to show that the president wasn’t referring to Trump’s supporters—plural—but rather, just to Hinchcliffe and his “hateful rhetoric,” as White House spokesman Andrew Bates said.
NPR’s David Folkenflick spoke for many when he noted it was difficult to discern what exactly the 81-year-old president said.
But the collateral damage was done, handing the Trump campaign fodder for its base.
“Frankly, they’ve treated you like garbage,” Trump told his supporters in North Carolina Wednesday. “You know what the truth is? They treated our whole country like garbage.”
Trump listed a litany of alleged slurs against MAGA World by the Democrats including “racist bigots” and “fascist deplorables.” But that’s not even where it ends, he said.
“Now we’re called Nazis and I’m called Hitler,” he said, declaring, “I’m not Hitler.”
But being called Hitler didn’t sting as much. “What’s worse than anything is garbage,” Trump said.
