Biden Receives Criticism for Referring to Trump Supporters as “Garbage”
During a campaign call on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden drew criticism for seemingly calling Republican Donald Trump’s followers “garbage.”
Biden addressed the issue that developed when one of Trump’s warm-up speakers at a rally in New York on Sunday called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” during a video conversation with the group VotoLatino.
Biden declared, “His supporters are the only garbage I see floating out there.” “It is unacceptable and un-American for him to demonize Latinos.”
The White House claimed in a statement that Biden was speaking to Trump’s statements rather than his followers.
White House spokeswoman Andrew Bates said, “The President called the hateful speech at the Madison Square Garden rally ‘garbage.'”
With Election Day barely a week away, Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, is in a close contest against Trump for the White House.
The Trump team latched on the remarks, and the Republican presidential candidate referred to them as “dreadful.”
“These individuals. “It’s awful, awful — awful to say something like that,” Trump remarked during a Pennsylvania campaign rally.
He likened the remarks to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, in which she called half of Trump’s followers “deplorables.”
“Garbage is worse, don’t you think so?” Trump joked in Pennsylvania.
J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, described Biden’s remarks as “disgusting.”
Kamala Harris and her boss Joe Biden are attacking half of the country,” he said.
At Sunday’s Trump rally in New York, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made more offensive comments about the sexual lives of African Americans and Hispanic immigrants, including joking that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage.”
The Pew Research Center estimates that there are about six million members of the diaspora in the United States who are able to vote, but residents of Puerto Rico, an American island territory in the Caribbean, are not allowed to participate in US elections.
Trump persisted in his campaign’s efforts on Tuesday to disassociate the former president from the comedian’s remarks.
He told broadcaster Fox News, “I don’t want anybody making nasty jokes or stupid jokes, whether that’s a big deal or not.”
He most likely shouldn’t have been present.
