Trump Sparks Outrage After Calling America a “Garbage Can”
Escalating his anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump is now calling the United States “a garbage can for the world.”
The Republican nominee used the descriptor twice on Thursday night during a campaign rally in Arizona. “First time I’ve ever said ‘garbage can’ but, you know what, it’s a very accurate description,” he claimed.
On Friday in Texas, Trump again said, “We’re like a garbage can. First time I said it was last night.… I said it—I don’t know, just came out, ‘garbage can.’ We’re like a garbage can for the rest of the world to dump the people they don’t want.”
The unsavory, nativist phrase has elicited public outcry, and on Friday afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris said Trump’s remarks were “just another example of how he really belittles our country.”
“This is someone who is a former president of the United States, who has a bully pulpit. And this is how he uses it? To tell the rest of the world that somehow the United States of America is trash?” Harris said. “I think, again, the president of the United States should be someone who elevates discourse and talks about the best of who we are.”
Online, many have decried Trump’s remarks as unpatriotic and departing from past U.S. leaders’ statements about America and immigration—such as those of John F. Kennedy, who celebrated America’s status as a “nation of immigrants” and wrote that “everywhere, immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.”
Historian Douglas M. Charles noted that Trump’s rhetoric parallels that of Ku Klux Klan leader William J. Simmons, who in the early 1920s said the United States is not “a melting-pot” but “a garbage can! … When the hordes of aliens walk to the ballot box and their votes outnumber yours, then that alien horde has got you by the throat.”
While the wording may be new—for Trump—his comparison of immigrants to garbage is consistent with his tendency to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, spanning back to his claims that Mexico was “bringing drugs,” “crime,” and “rapists” to the U.S. when announcing his 2016 campaign. More recently, he has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” repeatedly referred to them as “animals,” and spread debunked rumors about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.