Joe Biden has landed on his closing argument for why Americans should elect Kamala Harris as the next president. That is, anyone who supports Donald Trump is human scum.
The moment came during remarks the president gave on Tuesday while discussing the Hispanic community in America. In a video posted to X by NBC News Senior White House Correspondent Gabe Gutierrez on Tuesday night, Biden claimed Trump “has no character and “doesn’t give a damn about the Latino community.”
The president referenced a joke told at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally this past weekend, wherein comedian Tony Hinchcliffe poked fun at Puerto Rico’s trash problem by referring to the territory as a “floating island of garbage.” While speaking of the incident, Biden referred to Americans who support Trump as “garbage.”
“[J]ust the other day, a speaker at [Trump’s] rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. … The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” the president said.
“Joe Biden is calling half the country garbage while his running mate Kamala Harris is calling everyone who opposes her a fascist,” Federalist CEO Sean Davis wrote on X. “This is not the behavior of a winning campaign. This is the behavior of a campaign that hates the voters it knows will crush Harris in a week.”
Biden’s remarks followed a days-long campaign by Democrats and their media allies to smear Trump and his supporters as the second coming of the Third Reich. As my colleague Logan Washburn noted, the grotesque attacks mirror the unhinged rhetoric coming from Harris and her flailing campaign.
Biden’s insult to millions of Americans who have and will vote for Trump next week bears a striking resemblance to comments issued by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. The then-Democrat presidential candidate referred to Trump supporters as “deplorables.”
The president’s remarks are unsurprising, however, given his open hostility towards Americans who refuse to support his and Harris’ authoritarian administration, which has weaponized the justice system to target Trump and conservatives.
In 2022, the Delaware Democrat gave a speech while flanked by members of the U.S. military in which he all but declared Trump supporters as existential threats to the republic. As Joseph Lobue previously noted in these pages, Harris openly defended such remarks from Biden, saying, as NBC reported in 2022, “there are moments in time when we have to also agree, all good people who care about our country, that there are those who right now are vividly not defending our democracy.”
