The establishment media immediately tried to reframe and explain away President Joe Biden’s labeling of Trump supporters “garbage.”
“There’s no way to spin it: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don’t just hate President Trump, they despise the tens of millions of Americans who support him. Kamala does not deserve four more years,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national spokesperson, said Tuesday.
Biden was speaking on an evening call on Tuesday to rally Latino voters when he brought up a Trump rally speaker’s racist insult of Puerto Rico over the weekend.
The media, however, tried to spin it.
“Trump and His Allies Link Biden’s ‘Garbage’ Comment to 2016 ‘Deplorables’ Remark,” read the New York Times headline.
The Times‘ Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman wrote:
Within minutes of the clip of President Biden’s remarks going viral, the Trump campaign and others were using it to attack Kamala Harris and Democrats.
..
On Tuesday, it was President Biden who provided the ammunition, appearing to call Trump supporters “garbage” while talking to Latino allies by video.
The Washington Post’s headline was “White House, Trump campaign clash over whether Biden called Trump supporters ‘garbage.'”
In the Post‘s story, Patrick Svitek tried to redirect the conversation to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke that Biden cited in his “garbage” comment:
A single apostrophe — or lack thereof — caused an uproar in the presidential race Tuesday night after President Joe Biden criticized former president Donald Trump during a virtual event and later denied he was referring to Trump’s supporters as “garbage.”
Other news outlets apparently tried to ignore the story altogether. Marc Caputo, national political reporter for the Bulwark, reported that NPR’s Morning Edition did not even mention the controversial remark to listeners:
The media’s strategy coincided with the Harris campaign’s, which did not immediately condemn Biden’s smear and reportedly debated whether to back Biden or disagree with him on the statement, the Times reported:
After Mr. Biden’s remark, Harris campaign officials privately gauged whether his comments would require her to disagree with him publicly or support his explanation that the comments were taken out of context, according to people familiar with the internal reaction. They asked for anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
A recent Gallup poll that found Americans’ trust in the media to report current events “fully, accurately and fairly” has plummeted to a record low. Only 31 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to tell the truth, one point below its low watermark of 32 percent in 2016 and 2023.
Biden’s smear on Tuesday overshadowed Vice President Kamala Harris’s closing argument Tuesday night in which she said she would be a president for “all Americans.” The pledge came just days after she called former President Donald Trump a “fascist.”
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.