Reacting to an offensive joke about Puerto Rico delivered by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at former President Donald Trump’s Sunday night mega-rally, President Joe Biden made an even more offensive remark about Trump supporters. On a Tuesday night Zoom call with members of Voto Latino, Biden said, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his [Trump’s] supporters.” Yes, the President of the United States called 74 million Americans garbage. Mary Chastain reported on this story here.
News of Biden’s inflammatory remark immediately went viral on social media and eventually reached the podium in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Trump was holding a rally.
In the clip below, Trump tells the crowd he finds Biden’s comment to be even worse than when Hillary Clinton called half of his supporters a “basket of deplorables” during a 2016 campaign speech.
Trump said, “Remember Hillary? She said ‘deplorable’ and then said ‘irredeemable,’ right? But she said ‘deplorable.’ That didn’t work out. ‘Garbage’ I think is worse.
He continued, “But he doesn’t know – you have to please forgive him. Please forgive him. For he not knoweth what he said,” adding, “And I’m convinced he likes me more than he likes Kamala.”
The story gets worse.
NBC News reporter Gabe Gutierrez broke the story. According to independent writer Jerry Dunleavy, the White House gave Gutierrez a copy of the original transcript that said “supporters” (plural), but gave other reporters an ever-so-slightly altered version that added an apostrophe to the word. It said “supporter’s” (singular possessive).
This minor bit of stealth editing changed the meaning of Biden’s remark. Rather than calling Trump’s supporters garbage, the White House would like people to believe that Biden was referring to his supporter’s “fill in the blank,” when he suddenly loses his train of thought, as he often does, in the middle of the sentence.
Attaching the new, improved version (that included the apostrophe), Politico’s White House bureau chief Jonathan Lemire, posted “the full Biden quote” on X. He claimed the quote was “being taken out of context.”
But unfortunately for Lemire, Biden can clearly be heard on the Zoom call saying, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” It simply wouldn’t make sense – even in Bidenspeak – to say “supporter’s” in this context.
It was a valiant effort, but considering that a video of the call is all over the internet, Lemire wasn’t fooling anyone. One wonders why a smart man would risk his journalistic integrity over this. Oh – that’s right.
The Trump War Room reported that not even CNN was buying the spin.
Senior Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller weighed in.
Before calling a lid, Team Biden made a final attempt at damage control. But it was way too late for that.
As I see it, apostrophegate rather ends the Hinchcliffe story as a problem for the Trump campaign. And lays it squarely at the feet of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. So much for Harris’s promise just hours earlier to be the president for all Americans during her much ballyhooed speech on the Ellipse.
Biden’s comment will also give fodder to those who believe he is trying to sabotage the Harris-Walz campaign.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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