The big lie behind Biden’s “garbage” gaffe scandal

Joe Biden is no longer competent at speaking in public. This makes him a poor surrogate for Kamala Harris’s campaign, but he is also the president, and therefore an extremely prominent surrogate for the Democratic nominee. 

This generated a problem for Harris Tuesday night when Biden set out to criticize dehumanizing rhetoric at a recent Trump rally and ended up spouting a garbled stream of words that may or may not have dehumanized all Trump supporters as “garbage.”

Conservatives have thus expressed their collective horror at the spectacle of a US president disparaging Americans whose only sin was disagreeing with him politically. But even if one stipulates that Republicans’ tendentious reading of Biden is correct, their professed outrage is not merely hypocritical but perniciously misleading. 

At worst, the president disparaged conservative voters momentarily, before disavowing that sentiment in his very next breath. During his time in office, meanwhile, Biden has showered federal resources on heavily Republican parts of the country. Trump, by contrast, derides progressives and immigrants as “enemies” and “vermin” without apology, and reportedly sought to block disaster aid to Democratic strongholds. 

There is one candidate in the 2024 race who sees wide swaths of the American public as less than human, and it is not Kamala Harris. The furor over Biden’s disjointed remarks serves to obscure this reality.

Trump dehumanizes his political adversaries without apology or equivocation. Biden does not. 

On Sunday, at a rally for Trump at Madison Square Garden, the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” During a video call with Latino supporters Tuesday night, Biden said of the incident:

And just the other day, a speaker at [Trump’s] rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage.’ Well, let me tell you something. I don’t — I — I don’t know the Puerto Rican that — that I know — or a Puerto Rico, where I’m fr— in my home state of Delaware, they’re good, decent, honorable people.

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.

That is the official White House transcript of the remarks, at least. Republicans argue that what Biden actually said was, “the only garbage I see floating out there is his [i.e., Trump’s] supporters.” In other words, Biden says he was calling Hinchcliffe’s demonization of Puerto Rico garbage, while Republicans say he was calling all Trump supporters trash.

It is impossible to distinguish “supporter’s” from “supporters” by ear. So, it cannot be known with certainty what Biden intended in the moment that those words escaped his lips. The surrounding context, however, undercuts the GOP’s interpretation. Immediately after uttering his controversial statement, the president said the following:

Now, Trump has di— tried to divide the country based on race, ethnicity, anything that does harm, to take their eye off the ball about what the terrible things he’s done and will do. But Kamala Harris has fought for all Americans and will be a president for all of America.

It is possible that Biden intended to 1) deride all Trump supporters as “garbage,” and then 2) immediately tout Harris’s commitment to fighting for human trash. But that strikes me as unlikely, particularly since the president has never said anything like that before during his half-century in public life.

Whatever Biden intended though, it is indisputable that his very next sentences disavowed the idea that Republican voters are “garbage” whose interests should be ignored. And after his event was over, Biden insisted that his intention had merely been to describe Hinchcliffe’s rhetoric as “garbage.”

Trump, meanwhile, is unequivocal in his belief that Democrats constitute “enemies from within” who must be vanquished. 

On Fox News last weekend, Howard Kurtz told Trump that “enemies from within” is “a pretty ominous phrase, if you’re talking about other Americans.”

“I think it’s accurate,” Trump replied.

The Republican nominee has also suggested that some of these enemies might need to be “handled” by “the military,” likened his political opponents to “vermin,” and claimed that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” 

Just last week, Trump described America as “a garbage can for the world,” arguing that other nations deposit their human refuse into the United States through immigration. 

Notably, Trump’s demonization of immigrants is not confined to those who lack legal status or even citizenship. He has baselessly accused legal US residents from Haiti of eating people’s pets and vowed to deport them. And he has described American citizens who came to this country through the diversity visa lottery as “horrendous” and “the worst of the worst.”

Trump did not feel compelled to disavow any of these statements after making them, nor to reassure the country that he wants to fight for every American. To the contrary, he is unabashedly committed to directing the power of the federal government against his political opponents and the millions of US residents whose presence in this country he abhors.

There isn’t the slightest equivalence between Biden’s rhetorical posture toward Republican voters and Trump’s toward Democrats and immigrants. And a similar gap surfaces when one examines each president’s actual governance.

Trump doesn’t just compare Americans he dislikes to garbage — he tries to treat them like it

During his time in office, Trump explicitly sought to aid Americans who’d voted for him while spurning those who dared to oppose him, multiple administration officials told Politico’s E&E News. 

As deadly wildfires ripped through California, Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid because the state had voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, according to Mark Harvey, his administration’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council. Harvey says that Trump only changed his mind after being shown vote totals demonstrating that there were more Trump supporters in Orange County, California, than in Iowa. 

Olivia Troye and Kevin Carroll, former homeland security officials in the Trump administration, both back up Harvey’s story.  

“Trump absolutely didn’t want to give aid to California or Puerto Rico purely for partisan politics — because they didn’t vote for him,” Carroll told The Guardian  earlier this month. Carroll went on to say that his former boss, then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, had to “twist Trump’s arm” to get him to release federal funding to those areas following the wildfires and Hurricane Maria, respectively.

Trump also withheld millions in wildfire aid from Washington in September 2020 because the state’s governor had criticized him, and the aid ultimately was not approved until Biden took office.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s memoir lends further credence to these claims. In 2019, after Hurricane Michael devastated the Florida Panhandle, DeSantis asked then-President Trump to order the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay 100 percent of the state’s recovery costs, instead of 75 percent, as was customary.

According to DeSantis’s book, Trump replied, “They love me in the Panhandle.  I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?”

Trump proceeded to order FEMA to pay 100 percent of Florida’s recovery costs. And yet, just two months earlier, he threatened to veto legislation that would have extended the same courtesy to Puerto Rico. And his administration proceeded to withhold $20 billion in hurricane relief from the island for a protracted period of time, while Trump reportedly told Kelly and then-Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney that he did not want a “single dollar going to Puerto Rico.”

The Biden administration has shown no comparable favoritism. To the contrary, its response to Hurricane Helene — which ravaged many conservative communities on the East Coast — has earned plaudits from Republican officials. 

Meanwhile, Biden’s signature piece of legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act — has actually directed disproportionate funds to red states. And Biden has also directed considerable federal funds toward improving infrastructure in conservative-leaning rural areas. 

Trump supporters who profess outrage at Biden’s words are guilty of more than hypocrisy

In sum, one presidential candidate is associated with a man who might have once referred to Republican voters as garbage momentarily — before immediately disavowing that idea, and after dutifully advancing the interests of conservative regions during his time as president. That candidate herself, meanwhile, has said, “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for” and “I believe the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not.”

The other presidential candidate has personally likened large swaths of the American public to “vermin” and “garbage” — repeatedly, and without apology — after seeking to choke off federal aid to Democratic victims of wildfires, and pledging to prosecute his political opponents the next chance he gets. 

Any public official who condemns Harris for somehow abetting the dehumanization of ordinary Americans is not merely guilty of hypocrisy, but of wildly misleading voters about an issue of vital importance: which presidential hopeful would — and would not — treat their least favorite segments of the American public like trash.