The White House on Wednesday sought to contain the damage from President Biden’s comments a day earlier suggesting former President Trump’s supporters were garbage, remarks the president’s team continued to argue were being misinterpreted.
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was hit with several questions at the top of her briefing about whether Biden had made a mistake with his comments and whether he thinks less of Americans who support Trump.
After reading Biden’s explanation posted on social media, in which he said “all I meant to say” was that rhetoric spewed by a comedian during Trump’s Sunday rally was garbage, Jean-Pierre insisted Biden was not calling the former president’s supporters garbage. She said he was instead referring to off-color and distasteful jokes told during the Trump event at New York City’s Madison Square Garden that have been roundly criticized.
“He has said multiple times that he is a president for all. It doesn’t matter if you live in a red state. It doesn’t matter if you live in a blue state. … It doesn’t matter who you voted for. It doesn’t matter if you voted for him or not. He is a president for all,” Jean-Pierre said, adding “hateful rhetoric” should be called out.
Pressed that this isn’t the first time the White House has had to defend or clarify a Biden comment, Jean-Pierre said that “nobody here is defending.”
Vice President Harris separately sought to clean up, noting Biden’s clarification.
“I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for. You heard my speech last night and continuously throughout my career. I believe that the work I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not,” Harris told reporters as she departed for a three-state campaign swing. “And as president of the United States, I will be a president for all Americans, whether you vote for me or not.”
Biden’s comments distracted attention from Harris’s speech Tuesday night on the White House Ellipse, where she issued warnings about Trump’s attempts to divide Americans as part of her campaign’s closing argument. Harris in her speech said Trump has “spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other” and that he would exacerbate polarization if elected to a second term.
The controversy surrounding Biden threatened to snag momentum the Harris camp hoped to build off the Ellipse speech with Election Day less than a week away.
Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf said Biden’s gaffe at least raised the question of whether the president had stepped on Harris’s moment.
“Biden kind of interferes with that, and that’s the problem,” he said.
The scrutiny on Biden’s flubbed remark “immediately takes the attention away from Harris, puts it on Biden, and gives Trump a better target, because his target has always been Biden,” Sheinkopf said. “So it wasn’t the best day everybody had, especially so close to the end.”
Republicans, who on Monday and Tuesday were playing defense over comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s controversial jokes at the rally, have seized on Biden’s comments to knock the president and Harris as divisive.
Trump at a rally Wednesday in North Carolina leaned into the matter, telling his supporters Biden and Harris have “treated you like garbage.”
“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,” said Democratic strategist Fred Hicks, pointing to the problematic headlines that came out of the Trump event.
“That being said, it’s a false equivalency,” Hicks added.
He argued the criticism of Biden is hypocritical because of the volume of disparaging rhetoric within the Republican Party against immigrants, women and other groups.
“You take one comment from President Biden, and Republicans try to put that on the scale and say that’s the same as all the comments made by Trump and his approved surrogates, and it is simply not,” Hicks said.
But the matter still could pose a hurdle for Harris as she looks to capture momentum in the last week of a razor-tight election.
The development brings Biden back into the spotlight, Sheinkopf said, and gives Republicans an excuse to attack him even though he’s no longer at the top of the Democratic ticket.
“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,” Sheinkopf said.
The Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), on Wednesday told George Stephanopoulos he and Harris have made it “absolutely clear that we want everyone as a part of this” and that it’s Trump’s “divisive rhetoric that needs to end.”
Walz sought to shift the focus to Trump’s comments that his political rivals are “the enemy from within.”
Nerves are on edge given the tightness of the race. The latest polling averages from Decision Desk HQ and The Hill show Harris 0.6 percentage points ahead of Trump nationally, with similarly tight margins in critical battleground states.
Both campaigns need all the momentum they can muster, with early voting already underway across the country.
Hicks called the Biden remark “unfortunate” but was optimistic it would be drowned out by other news.
“I think this will fade to black, and there’ll be something else, probably that Donald Trump says,” he said.
