Garbagegate

Regime mouthpieces try, and fail, to constrain the fallout of Joe Biden's Kinsley gaffe.

Donald Trump talks to reporters as he sits in a garbage truck Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024, in Green Bay, Wis. | AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson

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As Obama once warned, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

Welp, ol’ Joe had a Kinsley gaffe for the ages last night after he slipped his leash, on camera, during a Voto Latino get-out-the-vote Zoom appearance. For whatever reason, some Democratic mental titans thought it wise for our “president” to wade into the row over a joke made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend. Hinchcliffe described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,”¹ sparking a still ongoing fusilade of confected rage on the Left. And so Biden, in a zombified rambling, bitterly called Donald Trump’s supporters “garbage.”

Just the other day, a speaker at his [Trump’s] rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. Well, let me tell you something, I don’t—I don’t know, the Puerto Rican that I know, the Puerto Rico where I’m fr—in my home state of Delaware. They’re good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.

That’s what he said. It’s very clear. You can watch the video yourself.

It’s a hilarious development in the waning days of the presidential race, another “deplorables” moment for the Democrats that has not only blunted the momentum of the ridiculous news cycle surrounding a comedian’s joke that the media was desperately hoping would undermine Trump’s electoral prospects, but which occurred right after Kamala Harris’ closing message speech in Washington, D.C. last night—an unparalleled epideictic performance that brought Jen Rubin to tears.

Obviously Biden’s comment qualifies as newsworthy. But it’s even more newsworthy when allegedly truth-seeking individuals instruct the public to disbelieve reality.

It goes all the way to the White House. Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters today that the president did not in fact call Trump’s supporters garbage. This press powwow followed the release of an official transcript adding an apostrophe² to the word “supporters,” suggesting that Biden was only talking about Hinchliffe and not Trump’s entire supporter base.

But even before the official transcript was released, cravenly servile mainstream media wordcels once again demonstrated how determined they are to torpedo every last iota of their profession’s credibility, working to clean up the spill and “cure” Biden’s language by magically inserting an apostrophe and hitting the “stutter” refrain.

“You know, having listened to this several times, I think you have an octogenarian with a stutter for whom clarity is an increasing challenge,” said NPR’s David Folkenflik. “As somebody who had a stutter growing up, it’s very obvious to me that there was an apostrophe after ‘supporter’s,” CNN’s Franklin Leonard averred. NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell likewise blamed the “verbal gaffe” on a “lifelong battle with stuttering.”

Note the chyron. To his credit, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro flatly stated that the president wasn’t helping by denouncing Trump supporters as “garbage.”

Perhaps the most egregious example of Operation Reshape Biden’s Words was courtesy of Politico’s Jonathan Lemire³:

Today’s media coverage has been exactly what you’d expect, I suppose.

The New York Times says that Biden only “appears to insult Trump supporters as ‘garbage.’” The Washington Post claims that the remark is “disputed” and should be consigned to Biden’s “record of verbal gaffes,” making sure to note that “Trump has for years vilified his political opponents with vicious and often offensive attacks.” New York Magazine pretends to be dumbfounded: “Republicans insist there was no apostrophe.” Politico’s Jonathan Martin believes that “Biden intentionally #triggered the right bc he knew it would keep Puerto Rican story cooking for another 48 hours, drive just enough PR turnout in Allentown + Phila to hand Kamala her margin in PA and the presidency.” Various other members of the presstitute pantheon of pundits chided people for acting like Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee for president and not Kamala Harris.⁴

In general, the media is seemingly convinced that what the sitting President of the United States says is less important than a joke told at a Trump rally that didn’t conform to delicate progressive sensibilities. Or at least that’s what they desperately want the public to believe. But note how this episode serves as a perfect distillation of why trust in the media reached another all-time low this year. These people have been hyperventilating like a bunch of wide-eyed hermeneutics about some mildly edgy joke all week. It was the lead story on CBS, CNN, and MSNBC the past three nights. On Monday and Tuesday alone there were a combined eight New York Times articles about this “stunningly inappropriate and racist” insult. And then when the president, on video, clear as day, called Trump supporters “garbage,” the same journos and pundits doctored the quote, went to great lengths to explain why it doesn’t matter, reverted to whataboutism, simply ignored it entirely, or, in the case of CBS’s Norah O'Donnell, chastised those of us who “are giving no grace to a gaffe by President Biden where he, in his explanation, inadvertently called Trump supporters garbage.”

Simply put, it is beyond my power to convey how much disgust I have for these shitlib agonistes who cosplay as highborn soothsayers tasked with reforming the unwashed masses, but who excel at nothing so much as sowing discord and division and fraying our social fabric.

The Harris campaign’s official response to Biden’s comment, as noted by CNN, is that “We won’t lose a single voter because of it.”

Wishful thinking. Democratic elites openly disdain Trump’s blue-collar base. The condescension from the entire beltway toward people who care more about the economy, immigration, and violent crime than they do about advancing the banner of Progress™ has grown every year since 2016. And now, just days before the election, Joe Biden’s Kinsley gaffe has elevated Dem snobbery to the forefront of the public’s mind, reminding the Great Unwashed that these preening, judgemental, moralistic, scolding patricians hold their noses so high in the air they could drown in a rainstorm.

There’s no doubt that this will have an impact on persuadable voters’ perceptions. It’s just a matter of how much. If nothing else, some of these folks will be reminded of Kamala’s role in covering up Biden’s senility. As I’ve argued before, the duplicity involved in the Democrat-led conspiracy to conceal the fact that our sitting president has essentially been a puppet, that his administration has been little more than an elaborate act of ventriloquy performed by faceless bureaucrats, will be enough reason for a non-negligible number of Americans to either abstain from voting for Harris or to cast their vote for Trump.

Just as importantly, Biden’s remark could potentially light a fire under the asses of generally apathetic but dissatisfied voters who, having already been somewhat primed by positive factors motivating them to vote for Trump, are now presented with a powerfully negative motivating factor and a chance to stick it to the constantly condescending purebred coastal elites.

Pollster Frank Luntz put it thusly:

Sometimes it’s much easier to get people to vote against something or someone than it is to get them to vote for something or someone. Obviously an excellent example of this is Trump himself and the unifying effect he has on the Left. But my gut tells me that Trump is going to win simply because a growing multiethnic assortment of citizens find themselves far more repelled by the status quo than they are by Trump’s return. The same negative energy that propelled Trump to victory in 2016 is once again in the air.

I’ll leave you with a passage from Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public that’s always stuck with me:

The why of Trump’s election is simple enough. A candidate that innocent of qualifications and political direction can be elected only as a gesture of supreme repudiation, by the electorate, of the governing class. From start to finish, the 2016 presidential race can best be understood as the political assertion of an unhappy and highly mobilized public. In the end, Trump was chosen precisely because of, not despite, his apparent shortcomings. He is the visible effect, not the cause, of the public’s surly and mutinous mood. Trump has been for this public what the objet trouvé was for the modern artist: a found instrument, a club near to hand with which to smash at the established order.

1. Which you could argue isn’t so much a joke as a statement of fact, as Michael Shellenberger pointed out. Puerto Rico has an insane trash problem.

2. Yet another example of the Biden administration violating the Presidential Records Act, which prohibits altering official transcripts.

3. Hilariously, today Lemire was signed as a new co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. You might recall that this ass clown did his part to take Trump’s “bloodbath” comment out of context. He lied to hurt Trump, and now he’s lying to help Harris.

4. Which begs the question: Why is Kamala Harris the Democratic nominee and not Joe Biden?