Talk about the gift that keeps on giving.
Joe Biden in a phrase did more to elect Donald Trump president than anybody else.
That was when the cognitively challenged president, going out the door, called Trump supporters — who make up half the country — “garbage.”
As only Biden can do, the president in the last days of the presidential campaign, turned what was considered a Trump campaign negative into a Trump campaign positive.
And in doing so he stepped all over Kamala Harris’s important Washington “closing arguments” campaign speech Tuesday night before thousands on the Ellipse in front of the White House.
Earlier, Trump had taken it on the chin when at his massive Madison Square Garden rally Sunday, a “comedian” named Tony Hinchcliffe told a “joke” about how Puerto Rico “was a floating island of garbage.”
Not funny.
Kamala Harris and the Democrats jumped all over Trump for the remark, calling him racist even though Trump denied even knowing the comedian or anything about his joke. “I have done more for Puerto Rico than any other president,” Trump said.
Enter hapless Joe Biden who, in his remarks about Trump, garbage and Puerto sucked all of the oxygen out of Harris’s last-ditch appeal to voters on why she should be elected president.
Even as Harris was making her case a Biden outreach video to Latin America voters was released in which Biden, in response to Hinchcliffe’s garbage remark said, “Donald Trump has no character. He doesn’t give a damn about the Latin community. Just the other day a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage.
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden said.
The remark was reminiscent of Hillary Clinton in 2016 when, running against Trump for president, she called Trump supporters “deplorables” and “irredeemable.”
Biden, in an added “say what?” comment said, “His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, un-American.” Biden said this at the same time he demonized Trump supporters.
Biden later tried to clean up his comment by saying that he meant to say that it was the “hateful rhetoric” about Puerto Rico at the Trump rally that was garbage. “That’s all I meant to say,” he wrote on X.
But I was too little too late. The damage had been done.
“This is disgusting,” J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate said. “Kamala Harris and her boss are attacking half of the country.”
Whether intentional or not, leading Democrats like Biden and Clinton cannot hide their disdain for half the country of Americans who support Trump for president.
So, it is no wonder why Harris and her advisers have sought to keep Biden out of her campaign. She can’t “turn the page” if the page is stuck, just as she is stuck with Joe Biden.
To get Biden out of the way she would have to throw the book at him, let alone turn the page.
And while Harris said she disagreed with Biden’s garbage comments, it is just the about the only thing she has criticized him for or broken from him in her years as vice president and as a presidential candidate.
Biden, to the consternation of Harris and her advisors, is not leaving the stage so easily.
And it is almost as though Biden wants to punish her for taking his place as the Democrat nominee for president, especially as he cannot do anything to the people who threw him to the curb and forced him out of the campaign like Nancy Pelosi and Brack Obama. With friends like these Biden did not need any enemies.
And there may be more than a kernel of truth in Trump’s statement that it appears that Joe Biden likes him more than he does Kamala Harris.
After all, it was not Trump who forced him out of the race. It was the people who are now supporting Harris who did it.
So, it is understandable if Biden feels scorned. That is because he was. He is not going gently into the night.
Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: [email protected]