Democratic pundits took to television networks Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning in an attempt to diminish President Joe Biden‘s reference to Trump supporters as “garbage.”
Biden’s comment was made during a Voto Latino online rally after former President Donald Trump’s event at Madison Square Garden. At Trump’s rally, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made a joke at the expense of the country of Puerto Rico that crowds poorly received, referring to it as a “floating island of garbage.” The president appeared in the Voto Latino rally and said, “The only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump’s] supporters.”
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), the Democratic vice presidential nominee, appeared on CBS Mornings and denied that Biden’s comments undercut the Harris campaign’s message of unity.
“I think President Biden was very clear that he was speaking about the rhetoric we heard, so it doesn’t undermine it,” Walz said. “People are hungry to come back together. They’re hungry to find a unifying message.”
“Donald Trump says shocking things every day, and Fox News and all of his people immediately go to it and brush it off and explain it away or completely ignore it,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said. “Here, they’re trying to make a firestorm out of something. … Really Joe Biden obviously doesn’t believe that.”
“By the way, as someone who had a stutter growing up, it’s very obvious to me that there was an apostrophe at the end ‘supporters’ there,” Black List CEO Franklin Leonard said on CNN NewsNight on Tuesday. “He was referring to the garbage spewed by supporters, not simply the supporters themselves.”
ABC News’s The View showed a compilation of clips from Trump in which he calls the country “a garbage can.” Meanwhile, co-host Whoopi Goldberg referred to Biden’s comments as “a slip of the tongue.”
“This is my problem. Let me explain to y’all. I don’t understand why all the pearl-clutching over Biden’s statement, why they all have a problem with what Biden said when what this other guy has said,” Goldberg said.
“For months, for months, for months, we’ve been hearing how Joe Biden is in dementia, that he’s old, he’s doddering, he can’t remember. All of a sudden, he’s clear as a bell,” co-host Joy Behar said.
However, many were unconvinced of these arguments, including The View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, who said Biden’s comments “stepped on” Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign message.
“It’s hard to really look at that when you can listen to it for yourself,” CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins said Tuesday.
“I’m giving you my fresh reaction to it. I would never insult the good people of Pennsylvania or any Americans even if they chose to support a candidate that I didn’t support,” Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) responded to Collins.
“This is consistent with who he is & consistent with what the Democratic Party has become,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) posted on X in reference to the comment. “Their hateful rhetoric needs to stop.”
“There is a very very very big difference between an insult comedian saying an island is a pile of garbage & a sitting US president saying ‘The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters’ of half the people in the country, he supposedly governs who support Trump,” Washington Examiner senior columnist Salena Zito wrote.
The Harris campaign scrambled to rally Latino voters in the days since Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden.
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Biden explained on X that he had intended to refer “to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage.”
Harris has largely avoided questions on the matter.