Did President Biden call Trump supporters trash? The White House responds with a statement.
US President Joe Biden caused a stir with a statement during a campaign phone call just a week before the US elections. In a video, Biden appears to have called Donald Trump’s voters “trash.” The clip, which was shared on social media, drew sharp criticism from supporters of the Trump campaign and prompted the White House to clarify: the president was simply misunderstood. Trump and his confidants such as tech billionaire Elon Musk tried to mobilize their supporters with a scandal.
In the phone call, Biden referred to the controversy surrounding the tasteless joke at a major Trump campaign event. A comedian described the US territory of Puerto Rico as an island of garbage floating in the ocean. The statement sparked widespread outrage in Puerto Rico – and that could become a problem for Trump shortly before the election. Around 500,000 Puerto Ricans live in the highly competitive and potentially decisive election state of Pennsylvania alone.
In the video, which was recorded during an online event by the organization Voto Latino, Biden spoke positively of Puerto Ricans and criticized Trump. He was then quoted online and by the Trump site as saying: “The only trash I see going on is his supporters.” According to the official transcript from the White House, the sentence went even further – and Biden did not describe the supporters themselves as trash, but rather statements that “demonized Latinos.” Biden himself also announced a little later on the online platform X that he meant the rhetoric. “That’s all I wanted to say.”
At this point, the quote that initially made the rounds had already been read out at a Trump campaign appearance. And Musk, who owns X, wrote there that Biden called half of America “trash.”
Trump immediately sought a comparison to the faux pas of his former opponent Hillary Clinton, who some of his supporters had described as deplorable. The Democratic candidate used the expression for this – “basket of deplorables” – during the 2016 US presidential election campaign. In a Sept. 9 speech at a fundraiser, she described “half” of her opponent Trump’s supporters as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic.”
The next day, Clinton publicly regretted saying “half of it” but stressed that Trump had unfortunately amplified “hateful views and voices.” The Trump campaign repeatedly used the phrase against Clinton’s campaign during and after the election.
The Biden blunder is also likely to be inconvenient for the current Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. At her most recent election campaign appearance in Washington on Tuesday, she vowed that she wanted to overcome the division in the United States.
“I promise to be a president for all Americans and to always put the country above the party and myself,” the 60-year-old shouted to the crowd. She wants to look for compromises and find solutions using common sense. She will also listen to those who disagree with her and who do not vote for her.