By New York Post (Politics) | Created at 2024-10-30 15:32:06 | Updated at 2024-10-30 23:30:34
8 hours ago
Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz defended President Biden calling Trump supporters “garbage” Wednesday — even as other Democrats sought to distance themselves from the outgoing commander-in-chief’s ill-timed comments just days before the 2024 election.
Walz, 60, answered “no” when “CBS Mornings” host Nate Burleson asked the Minnesota governor if the comment was “an example of maybe why he [Biden] should be sidelined?”
Biden and Harris were filling “two different positions,” the Democratic No. 2 contender attempted to explain.
“President Biden’s the president of the United States. He’s running it,” Walz said. “Vice President Harris is our candidate and will be the next president. And I think there’s two different positions there.”
“The vice president is out speaking about the things that we need to be done for the country. She’s talking about all of those issues that matter to folks,” he went on. “And the president is doing what he needs to do, and that’s making sure our country is reducing inflation, making sure that we’re taking our leadership role in the world where American values are front in center. So no, it doesn’t.”
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden said on a Tuesday call with the get-out-the-vote group Voto Latino. “His, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
The White House released a transcript later that inserted an apostrophe to lessen the blow, putting the onus on a Trump’s “supporter’s” comments — apparently comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who joked at a Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”
“The President referred to the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally as ‘garbage,’” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a companion statement.
Biden, 81, also tried to clean up his remarks in an X post, suggesting he or his staff knew the gravity of his insult.
“Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage—which is the only word I can think of to describe it,” the president said.
“His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That’s all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don’t reflect who we are as a nation.”
But several Democrats remained unconvinced that the statement was a gaffe.
“I would never insult the good people of Pennsylvania or any Americans even if they chose to support a candidate that I didn’t support,” said Keystone State Gov. Josh Shapiro in a CNN interview Tuesday night.
One Democratic operative told The Post that Biden’s trash talk was “extremely problematic in this final stretch.”
“Biden seems completely out of the picture at this point and walled off from the campaign,” the source said. “That being said, Trump obviously didn’t do himself any favors with that rally. There’s only so much cleanup you can do with a week or so to go.”
The operative and others also tried to suggest that Hinchcliffe’s Puerto Rico remark will have “far more damaging implications.”
“Biden is a gaffe machine, and the American people know it’s always churning,” another Democratic source said. “The problem Trump has with Puerto Rico can be summed up with one word: Pennsylvania.”
Still other Democratic allies wanted Biden to go further.
“Garbage is an understatement for MAGA extremists,” posted billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, a major Harris donor. “Biden suggests Trump supporters are ‘garbage’ after comic’s insult of Puerto Rico.”
During the 2016 election, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton maligned half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables,’” she said at a Manhattan fundraiser in September 2016. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”
Harris, 60, is currently lagging a fraction of a point behind Trump, 78, in the RealClearPolitics national average of recent polls.
Across the seven critical swing states, the vice president is down one percentage point to the former president, per RCP averages.
