The timing of President Joe Biden’s “garbage” smear muzzled Vice President Kamala Harris’s closing pivot, Democrats acknowledged Thursday.
Harris tried on Tuesday to unify “all Americans” behind her campaign after suggesting for weeks that former President Donald Trump is a “fascist” and Hitlerian dictator.
Biden’s smear, calling Trump supporters “garbage,” apparently flew too close to the sun and contradicted Harris’s newly devised campaign rhetoric of vowing to be a “president for all Americans.”
“Biden kind of interferes with that, and that’s the problem,” Democrat strategist Hank Sheinkopf told the Hill about Biden stepping on Harris’s closing pitch.
“It’s hard to imagine that [Biden] had any desire to injure Kamala Harris — quite the contrary. But by showing up, he’s changed the discussion on the campaign in the last few days,” he added.
Democrat strategist Fred Hicks suggested Biden’s timing was “unfortunate” because Harris’s pivot was “riding a wave.”
“It was definitely unfortunate that the president made that statement, because the Harris campaign has really been riding a wave of breaking support since the Madison Square Garden rally,” he said.
“You want[ed] a new page,” Chuck Rocha, a Democrat strategist, acknowledged to the New York Times. “She [Harris] respects him [Biden] but you got to make your own way without the shadow of him.”
“There’s one thing her and Donald Trump have to do which is be the change agent. And you can’t be the change agent if he’s there,” he added.
Reporters immediately asked Harris on Wednesday about Biden’s remark. Harris claimed Biden clarified his statement and was forced to disagree with demonizing “people based on who they vote for.”
The White House, meanwhile, released a transcript of Biden’s smear and added an apostrophe to “supporters” and an em-dash to make it apparently change the meaning of his statement.
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.