By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post (c) 2024
For years, Republicans have strained to recreate the political magic that was Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment. This was when Clinton in September 2016 decided to label as many as half of Donald Trump’s supporters racist, sexist, Islamophobic and/or xenophobic. She soon walked it back, but the damage was done. Voters overwhelmingly rejected the characterization, and Clinton herself later wagered it helped cost her the 2016 election.
Republicans’ latest entry on the eve of the 2024 campaign – President Joe Biden’s “garbage” comment Tuesday night – is more plausible than most as their hoped-for “deplorables” moment. But it’s still not nearly as ironclad as Clinton’s comments.
And Biden’s increasing tendency to stumble over his words, which marred these very comments, makes it entirely plausible that he didn’t intend to tar large numbers of Trump supporters – as he soon clarified that he hadn’t.
It may come down to the placement of an apostrophe, and it’s worth a parse.
The controversy centers on jumbled comments Biden made on a call with Latino voters. Biden invoked comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s quip at a Trump rally Sunday labeling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – comments that many Republicans and even the Trump campaign have distanced themselves from.
“Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage,’ ” Biden said, before his stumbles began.
“Well, let me tell you something,” Biden said. “I don’t – I – I – I don’t know the Puerto Rican that – that I know – or Puerto Rico where I’m fr – in my home state of Delaware, they’re good, decent, honorable people.”
And then the key line. I’ll offer three different versions which significantly change Biden’s meaning:
-“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
-“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters’ – his – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
-“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
Republicans favor the first one, because it would mean labeling at least some of Trump’s supporters “garbage.”
The latter two versions would suggest this was more about something that unspecified Trump supporters or one supporter did – say, calling Puerto Rico an “island of garbage” or making various other off-color, racist and sexist remarks at Trump’s rally Sunday – rather than what many of them are. They would suggest it was just a matter of Biden not finishing his sentence or that “his” referred to Hinchcliffe rather than Trump.
The White House’s version of the transcript initially cited “supporters’,” plural possessive, before it was changed to the singular-possessive “supporter’s” – suggesting this was aimed just at Hinchcliffe.
Which, as noted, is entirely plausible. The context is clearly Biden talking about Hinchcliffe’s remark. Biden often speaks in non sequiturs, failing to finish his thoughts and shifting course midsentence, including in the Delaware comments that preceded his “garbage” remark. It’s basically the entire premise of Dana Carvey’s Biden impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.” And mere hours earlier on Tuesday, Biden had made another confusing reference to Hinchcliffe.
Biden said Tuesday night that his reference was indeed intended for Hinchcliffe. Biden said he was labeling “the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage – which is the only word I can think of to describe it.”
It’s also plausible that Biden did step in it here. He’s certainly shown he’s capable of that – including long before his recently proliferating verbal stumbles. As Biden himself often says, “I mean what I say; the problem is that I sometimes say all that I mean.”
Just last week, he made a comment about locking Trump up – the kind of rhetoric Democrats have long criticized Trump and his supporters for – before catching himself.
“We gotta lock him up,” Biden said, before qualifying: “Politically lock him up. Lock him out. That’s what we have to do.”
The other relevant history here, though, is just how many times we’ve been down this road. Republicans and their allies have repeatedly cast Democrats’ comments as a new “deplorables” moment.
That was the case when Biden in 2022 linked the “MAGA philosophy” to “semi-fascism.” As now, Republicans claimed Biden was tarring half the country as semi-fascists, even as Biden explicitly said he wasn’t talking about all or even most Republicans and even as the comments echoed Trump’s own rhetoric about Democrats.
Republicans in 2021 similarly claimed Biden was calling Trump supporters Neanderthals when he cited the “Neanderthal thinking” of Republican governors rescinding covid mask mandates.
The narrative was much the same during the 2020 campaign when Biden claimed some people supported Trump because they liked his divisive rhetoric, which Biden summarized as “Mexicans are rapists and all Muslims are bad and … dividing this nation based on ethnicity, race.”
Zeteo columnist Justin Baragona on Tuesday night ran down a number of other examples of conservative media claiming such new “deplorables” moments from Democrats.
None of them have lived terribly long in the memory for a reason: They weren’t as cut and dried as advertised – and certainly not as cut and dried as Clinton’s comment. And that’s again the case with Biden’s comment, even as his syntax is clearly unhelpful for his party.
If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that Democrats should probably be glad the guy who keeps stepping in it like this isn’t actually leading their ticket anymore.