President Joe Biden moved to clarify his comments about Sunday’s Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden after Republicans pounced on a comment they said demeaned the former president’s supporters.
Biden took part in a phone call with Voto Latino on Tuesday evening in which he denounced comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist set at the New York City rally. Hinchcliffe had called Puerto Rico an “island of trash” and made other racist and anti-Semitic comments. Biden defended Puerto Ricans, speaking about the comedy set, before appearing to call Trump’s supporters themselves trash.
“In my home state of Delaware, they are good, decent, honorable people,” Biden said of Puerto Ricans. “The only trash I see floating out there is his supporters… his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and un-American.”
“It’s totally inconsistent with everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been,” Biden added.
Andrew Bates, a senior deputy press secretary at the White House, clarified that Biden was referring to the overarching rhetoric at the Manhattan rally as “trash,” not the people there to support Trump. He released a transcript that included an apostrophe in the president’s comments — “the demonization of his supporters” — to indicate that the president was criticizing Hinchcliffe’s words.
Biden later released a statement expanding on his comments, saying the remarks at Trump’s rally did not reflect “who we are as a nation.”
“Earlier today, I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by the Trump supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as nonsense — and that’s the only word I can think of to describe it,” the president said. “His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That’s all I wanted to say.”
The comments were quickly picked up by Trump’s allies and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
“Just now, Joe Biden declared that our supporters are trash,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said Tuesday night at Trump’s rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, drawing boos from the crowd. “He’s talking about the Border Patrol, he’s talking about nurses … he’s talking about everyday Americans.”
“I hope their campaign is about to apologize for what Joe Biden just said,” Rubio continued. “We are not trash. We are patriots who love America.”
Trump had a brief response on stage after hearing the news on stage, calling Biden’s comments “terrible” and comparing them to his rival Hillary Clinton’s 2016 comment that half of Trump’s base was in a ” basket of deplorable things” could be stopped.
“Remember Hillary, she said ‘deplorable,’” Trump recalled. “That didn’t work out….I think garbage is worse?”
“Please forgive him,” Trump added of Biden. “Because he doesn’t know what he said.”
Vance distributed a video of Biden’s comments on X, formerly Twitter, and challenged media networks that “obsessively covered a comedian’s joke” to do the same for the president.
Support free journalism
Support JS
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
“Will they even report honestly on this disgusting behavior by our current leadership?” the senator asked.
On Monday, Vance said he was “so fed up” with people being offended over “every little thing” when asked about Hinchcliffe’s racist comments, saying he hadn’t even heard them.