Biden F*cked Up. There’s No Other Way to Put This.
Tony Hinchcliffe, the opening act of Donald Trump’s ballyhooed Madison Square Garden event, left a trail of controversy in his wake after performing a set full of abjectly racist jabs aimed at various minority groups. The “shock comic” wasn’t the only one at the MSG event to spew invective, but Hinchcliffe’s words careened into the news cycle because of the primacy effect — he was the first on-stage — and because his wisecracks were so plainly bigoted.
“Where are my proud Latinos at tonight? You guys, see what I mean? It’s wide open. There’s so many of them. It’s absolutely incredible… Believe it or not, people, I welcome migrants to the United States of America with open arms. And by ‘open arms,’ I mean like this. [refusal and shooing gestures]
“These Latinos, they love making babies, too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country. […]
“I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”1
Finally, we’d reached a point in which the mainstream media could focus on the racism in the Trump campaign without also expecting some reply from Kamala Harris. Unlike Trump’s comments at the National Association of Black Journalists in July, where Trump maligned Harris’s racial background (precipitating a scramble among the press to see if and how Harris might respond), the only people involved in this instance were Trump and his entourage. This was all on him.
The backlash was immediate. Puerto Ricans were rightly infuriated by some two-bit comic calling their beloved island garbage. Pundits speculated whether this self-inflicted wound would derail Trump’s momentum going into the home stretch of the campaign, given that the election was just over a week away. A bevy of Puerto-Rican celebrities voiced outrage. Trump began to lose endorsements.
For his part, Trump could not find it in himself to apologize. Trump himself had called America a “garbage can” just days before this event. This appears to have been a running theme.
He couldn’t back away from Hinchcliffe’s remarks without incurring real loss of face. Instead, he reversed and overcompensated, saying that the rally was a “lovefest” and the most beautiful thing — which gives one an idea of just how highly Trump values racism, how warm it makes him feel.
Ever since Harris assumed the status of standard bearer for the Democrats, Trump has been wallowing in racist tropes. At first, he had outsourced this task to his proxies and associates but, in this last week of the campaign, it appears to have been his calculation that main-staging this attitude would only benefit him with his base.
It’s a thoroughly racist party now, and the press was starting to pick that up and showcase that. I saw headlines that pondered whether this moment might derail Trump’s entire campaign.
Just then, Joe Biden decided to weigh in on the controversy. By sticking his nose in it, he has ruined whatever momentum there was in the media to hold Trump accountable.
The problem wasn’t that Biden said something. He could have left well enough alone, but underlining what Trump and this erstwhile comedian said was within his rights. In fact, it would have been great, had Biden drawn a connection between the rhetoric at Trump’s event with Biden’s own warning two years ago that Trump and the GOP were “semi-fascists.” That would have been the perfect time to make that callback.
Instead, Biden used the same word that this shock comic used, in a sentence where the target of the insult was ambiguous.2
“Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage’ … 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.” — President Joe Biden
One current headline reads, “Is Biden's ‘garbage’ comment another Clinton ‘deplorables’ moment? Depends where the apostrophe is.”
It depends where the apostrophe is.
Do you think that MAGA folks are going to parse Biden’s comment for an apostrophe? Of course not.
One, a lot of people in the MAGA movement carry grudges and look to add to them. It’s a movement based on grievance. So this is just one more confirmation, in their eyes, that Democrats don’t care for them. This comment joins not only Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment (which, to be fair, I agreed with her assessment at the time) but also Barack Obama’s assertion that Midwesterners “cling to guns or religion.”
So there’s that. But the fatality in Biden’s remark is the fact that he used the word ‘garbage.’ By making a gaffe so easily misconstrued as being an insult against an entire group of people, Biden drained the potency of the word from the controversy that was raging in the Trump camp just yesterday, where they were on the backfoot and falling behind.
The messaging war now is completely turned on its head, because it turns directly on the word that’s shared in common. It’s a complete momentum shift.
Now Harris and her team are having to distance themselves from Biden. He could have simply stayed in the background, where he had faded into wallpaper since stepping aside in the presidential contest. We’d seen him only occasionally since July in quite the disappearing act. He’s chosen the worst possible time to reappear.
Don’t get me wrong. Puerto Ricans and other people who were pointedly insulted by Hinchcliffe and others in Trump’s ragtag troupe won’t be deterred or distracted by this turn of events. They will indeed carry their outrage into the voting booth.
But Trump can now use Biden’s remarks, distorted and stretched out of proportion, to drive a sense of indignation among his own base of support. And now they’ll go into the voting booth similarly feeling backbitten. It is the worst outcome that could have shaken out with less than a week to go.
Hinchcliffe also insulted other groups, including Black people (“Black guy with a thing on his head — is that a lampshade? … I’m just kidding, that’s one of my buddies. He had a Halloween party last night. We had fun. We carved watermelons together”) and Jewish and Palestinian people in a two-fer. (“When it comes to Israel and Palestine, we’re all thinking the same thing: settle your stuff already. Best two out of three — rock, paper, scissors. You know the Palestinians are going to throw rock every time. But you also know the Jews have a hard time throwin’ that paper! [gestures as though running dollar bills off a stack]”)
The Washington Post offers three versions of this sentence, of which I’ve highlighted the most charitable one (which is also the one that the White House is defending). The other formulations include “supporters” and “supporters’” (with an apostrophe denoting a plural possessive).
I personally think, quite aside from the unnecessary response from Biden, that Harris is already dragged down by her ties to genocide Joe. And To think I thought we had terrible choices in the last two elections!
You're right, Nova. Sucha sick, vile "comedian" and Biden had to play right into it. I want it to all go away, the stupidity and the evil. We are doomed by it.