It was a «basket of deplorables» moment that came at the worst possible time for the Kamala Harris campaign.
It was a “basket of deplorables” moment that came at the worst possible time for the Kamala Harris campaign.
On Tuesday, the sitting president of the United States, Joe Biden, chose to denigrate half the nation on a recorded Zoom call just before his vice president took the stage for her big “closing argument” speech at the Ellipse in Washington, DC.
“The only garbage I see floating out there is [Donald Trump’s] supporters,” Biden proclaimed.
It cannot be understated just how damaging this was for Harris at a time when her poll numbers show voters increasingly in Trump’s corner — and as the runway to Election Day gets ever shorter.
Social media absolutely exploded, taking Biden’s ugly comments viral to the tune of tens of millions of views, while even legacy media were begrudgingly forced to cover it.
The White House press office, for its part, edited the transcript with some artfully placed punctuation to make it appear Biden was only talking about comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, whose ill-advised joke about Puerto Rico’s trash problem became an unwanted controversy after Trump’s triumphant Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday.
But no one is buying it.
This isn’t a matter of a line on a transcript. There’s actual video and audio of Biden’s remarks — and both make it quite clear he was trashing basically half the country by calling them garbage.
And really, it’s not all that surprising given the Democratic Party’s disdain for working-class voters and other dissidents in recent years.
