America hasn’t heard much from Joe Biden recently. You remember … Joe Biden? He wanted to run for re-election this year, but his political party forced him to quit that effort because of competency concerns, despite his own insistence that he was fit for the job. Instead, the party installed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, to run in his place. None of the rank-and-file party members got to vote on that decision, but – not to worry – Harris herself told the American public she wouldn’t do anything differently than Biden. They are, in other words, perfectly interchangeable. Although it’s easy to forget, Joe Biden is still supposed to be president. And in that capacity last week, he tried to help Kamala Harris’s own election effort by characterizing “supporters” of her opponent, Donald Trump, as “garbage.”
It’s not clear exactly how many Americans support Donald Trump, but polls indicate it’s roughly half the voting population in the United States. The last time Donald Trump ran for president, in 2020, he received well over 74 million votes. And Trump voters overwhelmingly support the Second Amendment.
That’s a lot of people, and gun owners, for a sitting president to write off as “garbage.”
It also seems to contradict what Joe Biden said in his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2021:
Today … my whole soul is in this:
Bringing America together.
Uniting our people.
And uniting our nation.
I ask every American to join me in this cause.
Uniting to fight the common foes we face:
Anger, resentment, hatred.
Apparently, Joe Biden has changed his mind since then.
The elites of his party, however, have a history of this sort of rhetoric. In 2016, we reported on similar comments made by Hillary Clinton, who also ran against Donald Trump. Those comments attracted a lot of negative attention, but if anything, they were more measured than Biden’s own remarks. Clinton only applied her slander to “half’ of Trump’s supporters, which she called a “basket of deplorables” because of their supposedly “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” views. “[S]ome” of these “deplorables,” Clinton went on to say, were “irredeemable.”
That’s admittedly bad enough, but if you parse through Clinton’s words, only “some” of “half” were in her lowest category.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, did not qualify his statement. Apparently, he thinks ALL of Trump’s supporters are garbage.
By contrast, Barack Obama’s infamous comment in April 2008 about “bitter” Americans who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”, almost sounds quaint and restrained. Obama was at least willing to acknowledge to an audience of Democrat donors in San Francisco there might be valid reasons why the party’s globalist economic agenda did not necessarily resonate with voters in post-industrial Heartland America.
Biden’s remark came in response to a joke made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at a recent Trump rally. Hinchcliffe is an insult comic in the tradition of Don Rickles, another daring performer lauded in bygone days by the New York Times. Being intentionally provocative, Hincliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” during his bit. While not funny to many (and disavowed by Trump himself), the line was in keeping with the popular entertainer’s equal opportunity jabs, which in the same set were directed at his own mother, Travis Kelce, and Trump himself, among others. The context, however, was Hinchcliffe’s more serious commentary about comedy and censorship and which political party has maintained its sense of humor.
Many Puerto Ricans themselves, apparently, were willing to give the comedian and Trump the benefit of the doubt, with one of the U.S. territory’s two “shadow senators,” Zoraida Buxó, providing Trump an enthusiastic endorsement days later. This follows a trend of what even the D.C. political press recognizes as Trump’s “massive” gains with young Black and Latino male voters in the current election cycle.
Whether or not insult comedy and political rallies are a good mix, Biden himself made the comedian’s point about which party cannot recognize a joke. “The only garbage I see floating out there,” Biden said in response, “is [Trump’s] supporters.” He then added, without a trace of irony, “His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and it’s un-American.”
There were many ways, of course, that Biden could have made his point that the comedian’s joke was beyond the pale. The fact he used the occasion to smear not just Hinchcliffe or Trump, but all of Trump’s supporters, indicates Democrat party elites still look upon their political opposition with undisguised, dehumanizing contempt. As Trump himself has observed: “they’re not after me, they’re after you, and I just happen to be standing in the way.”
Biden’s choice of words of course begs the question: Isn’t calling roughly half the adult population in the U.S. “garbage” also unconscionable and un-American?
By the standards of Biden and Harris’s Democrat party, apparently not. As one Harris campaign staffer opined to CNN about Biden’s remark: “We won’t lose a single voter because of it.”
CNN “senior political analyst” Mark Preston went even further in his analysis of Biden’s “garbage” comment. “You know, I’m of the mindset that if you say it, you might as well just embrace it,” he stated, and then went on to suggest that Democrats, if anything, have not been “strong enough” in their condemnation of “all those racist supporters of Donald Trump”. Preston encouraged Biden, rather than to back off or contextualize the comments, to say, “Yeah, I do think that they’re terrible.” Acknowledging that Biden meant exactly what he said, Preston concluded: “I think that when Joe Biden backs off of saying what he really believes, I don’t think that’s a good look.”
Nevertheless, the furor over the comments has forced both Biden and Harris into a defensive mode. Biden, for his part, predictably has said he was misunderstood, although the video showing the full statement in context is readily available on multiple websites. Harris executed the typical D.C. two-step, which involves denying what was said was said, but then claiming even if it was said, she doesn’t agree with it. “Listen, I think that, first of all, he clarified his comments,” she told a reporter. “But, let me be clear, I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”
Yet Harris’s own recent statements on the campaign trail include calling Donald Trump a “fascist” and claiming he is “dangerous” and an admirer of Adolf Hitler. In the highest-profile speech of her campaign, she warned of “chaos and division” if Trump were to be elected and said of her opponent: “This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.” Needless to say, Harris in the same address emphasized – as Biden did before her – her determination to “be a president for all Americans.”
That didn’t work out so well for Joe Biden. And it’s hard to imagine how a person who believes her political opponent takes his cues from Hitler would nevertheless respect the views and values of the opponent’s supporters, or, as she promised, to “give them a seat at the table.”
Trump, for his part, seized the opportunity to underscore the distinction between his “America first” vision and the vitriol his opponents have heaped upon ordinary, decent, hardworking Americans. Last Wednesday, he donned a yellow safety vest and boarded a garbage truck en route to a rally in Green Bay, WI. There, his response to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was simple, poignant, and true: “you can’t lead America if you don’t love Americans.”
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