The News
As soon as Joe Biden stumbled over his words in a Latino outreach call — saying either that Trump supporters, or a single Trump supporter, were “the only garbage I see floating out there” — Republicans knew how to respond.
“Remember Hillary,” Trump said at a Tuesday night rally in Allentown, Pa. “She said ‘deplorable.’”
The furor over Biden’s quote, a mangled reference to roast comic Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a “floating pile of garbage” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, fit into a tradition as long as two presidential terms.
Since Sep. 9, 2016, when Hillary Clinton told donors in New York that “half” of Trump’s supporters fit “into what I call the basket of deplorables,” Democrats have feared saying something that could be interpreted as a smug insult to Republican voters. And Republicans have rarely wasted an opportunity to interpret it that way.
“The same party that called Republicans deplorables and fascists has now decided that we’re garbage,” wrote Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer on X, demanding an apology from her opponent, independent union organizer Dan Osborn.
“Add this to the ‘basket of deplorables’ and ‘nazi’ slurs against Americans,” wrote Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt.
The White House attempted to clean up Biden’s remarks before most Republicans had reacted to them. “I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage,” Biden posted on his official X account. Talking with reporters on Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris quickly distanced herself from the quotes, saying that she “strongly disagree[d] with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”
Fifty minutes after her statement, the Trump campaign texted donors a message in the voice of JD Vance, saying “it pissed me off when Biden called you garbage,” and that “Kamala’s silence is worse.”
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David’s view
Start with the obvious: Democrats would rather be talking about Harris’s closing message and a good GDP report today, but Biden put them on clean-up duty. Harris’s quick response, made as soon as she saw cameras on Wednesday morning, shows how much Democrats learned after the “deplorables” moment eight years ago. Rather than dwelling on what Biden meant, they’re emphasizing they don’t agree with it. Without more oxygen, this whole story could be over by sunset, filed away like Biden telling New Hampshire Democrats last week that they needed to “lock [Trump] up… politically.” (If you’d never heard about this, that’s my point.)
If it does last, it’ll be because of one of the great successes in modern conservative messaging: Making Democrats eat their words if they say something insulting about non-Democrats.
The modern version of this began in April 2008, when Barack Obama told California donors, who were unhappy that he wasn’t winning the Pennsylvania primary, that people in some left-behind towns “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment.” This lived on as proof that Obama (who performed better in rural areas than any Democratic nominee since) loathed small-town America. The “deplorables” moment was even more powerful, embraced instantly by the Trump campaign, which has looked for similar-sounding lines ever since.
Biden’s gaffe is missing some of the elements that powered those stories. Obama and Clinton were talking to donors, making their analysis sound even more patronizing. He’s also not the nominee anymore; Republicans have tried to blur this by insisting that Harris, who said she disagrees with Biden, actually does agree with him.
Their confidence comes from experience. Announcing that something is “the new deplorables” has been pretty effective, at least at freezing a news cycle. In April 2020, after Biden told donors that he probably couldn’t win diehard Trump voters — “there are people who support the president because they like the fact that he is engaged in the politics of division” — the Trump campaign claimed that he was “condescendingly describing them all as deplorable racist xenophobes.” One year later, after Biden said that Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves was engaged in “neanderthal thinking,” Reeves insisted that he’d heard an echo of Clinton’s gaffe.
“Today I feel the same way as I did the day that Hillary Clinton called all of us in Middle America ‘deplorables,’” Reeves said.
The outrage machine could be turned on anyone. Last year, after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that conservatives should be rooted in principles, and not “listless vessels that are just supposed to follow whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social,” Trump’s campaign claimed that he’d a Clinton-style gaffe. “Looks like Ron DeSanctimonious just had his ‘Basket of Deplorables’ moment,” Trump strategist Jason Miller said. DeSantis denied it, but dropped that line.
Harris has been far more careful than Trump’s other opponents. That’s not surprising; her campaign team includes Clinton 2016 veterans scarred from touching the “deplorables” stove. Several times, she’s navigated around questions designed to clarify whether she dislikes Trump voters. In her Fox News interview this month, Bret Baier pressed Harris on why, if Trump was “as bad as you say,” so many voters still supported him.
“Are they misguided, the 50%?” Baier asked. “Are they stupid? What is it?”
Harris didn’t take this bait. “I would never say that about the American people,” she said, adding that Trump was “the one who tends to demean and belittle and diminish the American people.”
If Biden’s mistake doesn’t impact the race, this will be why. Harris is too careful to make it herself. And she’s the one on the ballot.
Notable
- In New York, Jonathan Chait argues that Republicans are engaging in hypocrisy by saying that Biden insulted all of their voters. “My general predisposition is that, when a speaker utters words off the cuff that are open to different interpretations, and only one of those interpretations is wildly offensive, we should generally assume he intended the less offensive version.”
- For CNN, MJ Lee and Samantha Waldenberg report that “senior campaign officials were fielding messages of exasperation from supporters — some of whom suggested that perhaps the president should find a way to disappear from public view altogether in the final six days leading up to Election Day.” Biden is currently planning to appear in his Pennsylvania birthplace, Scranton, before the vote.
- In The New York Times, Nicholas Nehamas reports on a related episode on the other side of the ticket, in which Trump declared “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president” while speaking in the same city. The Harris campaign made an expensive ad buy in the area accusing Trump of denigrating its residents.