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By Joe Concha
It was a “basket of deplorables” moment that came at the worst possible time for the Kamala Harris campaign.
On Tuesday, the sitting president of the United States, Joe Biden, chose to denigrate half the nation on a recorded Zoom call just before his vice president took the stage for her big “closing argument” speech at the Ellipse in Washington, DC.
“The only garbage I see floating out there is [Donald Trump’s] supporters,” Biden proclaimed.
It cannot be understated just how damaging this was for Harris at a time when her poll numbers show voters increasingly in Trump’s corner — and as the runway to Election Day gets ever shorter.
Social media absolutely exploded, taking Biden’s ugly comments viral to the tune of tens of millions of views, while even legacy media were begrudgingly forced to cover it.
The White House press office, for its part, edited the transcript with some artfully placed punctuation to make it appear Biden was only talking about comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, whose ill-advised joke about Puerto Rico’s trash problem became an unwanted controversy after Trump’s triumphant Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday.
But no one is buying it.
This isn’t a matter of a line on a transcript. There’s actual video and audio of Biden’s remarks — and both make it quite clear he was trashing basically half the country by calling them garbage.
And really, it’s not all that surprising given the Democratic Party’s disdain for working-class voters and other dissidents in recent years.
We can trace it back to Barack Obama, who as a presidential candidate in 2008 was caught on a hot microphone saying voters in the Midwest were “bitter” as they “cling to their guns or religion” on the topic of illegal immigration.
After learning the comment was caught on tape, Obama apologized for the remark — but not because he meant it. There was an election to be won, after all.
Hillary Clinton in 2016 just couldn’t help herself, either, when she called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” during a public fundraiser.
The slur served as a rallying cry, particularly for blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Clinton went on to lose the three “Blue Wall” states she thought she’d had all wrapped up as they, and the White House, went to Trump.
Biden, too, has targeted Trump supporters time and again during his presidency.
“There’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country,” Biden, once styled as the unity candidate, bellowed in a grim Philadelphia speech in 2022 before a memorably ominous red background.
An eye-popping 62% of independents said Biden’s address was “a dangerous escalation in rhetoric and designed to incite conflict amongst Americans,” a Fox News poll found.
This kind of rhetoric likely helped fuel two assassination attempts against Trump this summer, including one in which a bullet came within a centimeter of ending his life at a Butler, Pa., rally.
Biden has never apologized, even after that violence.
So the big question is: Why?
Why do Democrats have such disdain for half the country?
Answer: They’re stuck in an elitist bubble. And when they actually venture into middle or rural America, they speak at people, mostly with the help of a teleprompter — instead of listening to them about what’s most important to them and their families.
This contempt derives from a worldview based on two things: money and education.
Obama is Columbia- and Harvard Law-educated.
Hillary: Wellesley and Yale Law.
As for Biden, he may have dubbed himself “Scranton Joe,” but judging by his multimillion-dollar Delaware homes and his vacations over the past four years at the mammoth estates of hedge-fund bosses in Nantucket, Lake Tahoe and St. Croix, Biden left his Pennsylvania roots far behind quite some time ago.
The disconnect with the voters she disdained cost Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2016.
And while Biden lets his scorn flow, Donald Trump, the billionaire businessman-turned-president, has been serving up fries at McDonald’s and getting wildly cheered at a Steelers game.
Despite his wealth, Trump is seen by many working-class voters as far more relatable than his opponent — who keeps insisting she grew up middle-class and worked at a McDonald’s despite scant evidence to back up either claim.
If Kamala does lose, we all know where the first finger of blame will be pointed: At the very boss she replaced at the top of the ticket, who made a garbage statement at crunch time.
Biden’s ‘garbage’ slur reflects Democrats’ snobbery — and could cost Harris the presidency https://t.co/sxiwVPdPEh pic.twitter.com/UruvAv2wk0
— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) October 30, 2024