By Stephen Collinson, CNN
Analysis - Joe Biden had largely been an afterthought one week before the election in which he'd once hoped to win a second term.
Not anymore.
With an imprecise attempt to defend Puerto Ricans from attacks at Donald Trump's rally in New York, the president on Wednesday inadvertently injected himself into the home stretch of the campaign and forced Vice President Kamala Harris into clean-up mode.
The gaffe offered Trump an opening to turn headlines away from his own antics that add up to the most extreme closing argument of any modern presidential campaign.
Biden mentioned Puerto Rico, slandered as a "floating island of garbage" by a comedian at Trump's Madison Square Garden event. But his clumsy defence of the self-governing American territory - and the vital swing voters in its diaspora on the US mainland - sparked a new political firestorm and distracted from Harris' big closing argument speech against a White House backdrop on Wednesday.
"And just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico 'a floating island of garbage.' Well, let me tell you something … I don't know the Puerto Rican that I know - or Puerto Rico where I'm - in my home state of Delaware - they're good, decent, honourable people," Biden said during virtual remarks in a Voto Latino get-out-the-vote call meant to help Harris.
"The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters," Biden said, pausing for a moment before continuing. "His, his demonisation of Latinos is unconscionable and it's un-American."
The White House quickly tried to clean up the president's remarks, with spokesman Andrew Bates saying he'd been referring to the "hateful rhetoric" at the rally in New York, not the former president's backers. He said that Biden had actually said this: "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter's - his - his demonisation of Latinos is unconscionable, and it's un-American."
And in a further sign that the White House recognises the potential political fallout of the episode, Biden himself took to social media to address it.
"Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump's supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage-which is the only word I can think of to describe it. His demonisation of Latinos is unconscionable. That's all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don't reflect who we are as a nation," Biden wrote on X.
But the damage may already have been done.
Biden's comment drew immediate comparisons with then-Democratic nominee Hillary's Clinton's remark in 2016 that half of Trump's supporters should be "put into the basket of deplorables" because of their "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic" views. Her remarks became a rallying call for Trump and conservative media and remain a badge of honour for Trump fans who view East Coast Democratic elites as condescending and disdainful of their way of life.
Harris was forced to address the controversy.
"Listen, I think, first of all, he clarified his comments, but let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for," the Democratic nominee said. "You heard my speech last night and continuously throughout my career. I believe that the work that I do is about representing all the people whether they support me or not," Harris said on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews.
"I am sincere in what I mean: when elected president of the United States, I will represent all Americans, including those who don't vote for me, and address their needs and their desires," Harris added.
But Trump had already seized on the remarks.
The former president was alerted to them by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio during a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Tuesday night. Trump said, "Wow. That's terrible. That's what it says. That's what it says. So, you have, remember Hillary, she said 'deplorable' and then she said 'irredeemable,' right? But she said deplorable, that didn't work out. 'Garbage' I think is worse, right?"
And Trump's campaign seized on Biden's remarks to try to create the same kind of dynamic, claiming that the ex-president is supported by "Latinos, Black voters, union workers, angel moms, law enforcement officers, border patrol agents, and Americans of all faiths," while his opponents "have labelled these great Americans as fascists, Nazis, and now, garbage." The Trump campaign's national press secretary Karoline Leavitt added: "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."
Harris now has a new political problem
No one can say how this latest twist in a turbulent campaign will affect the final result. But in the vicious heat of the last week of the deadlocked presidential campaign, when even a few imprecise words can wreak significant political consequences, it may not matter what Biden really meant. Perception is everything.
Just when Harris' team wanted to keep the attention on Trump's Madison Square Garden rally, which played into her contrast message, the president handed Harris a political mess. She's now almost certain to be asked whether she also regards Trump's backers as "garbage." Her answer will only prolong the story. The former president is also likely to seize on the gaffe to argue that Democrats view working Americans in the heartland with contempt.
A Trump fundraising email evening read: "FIRST Hillary called you a DEPLORABLE! THEN they called you a FASCIST! And moments ago Kamala's boss Biden called you GARBAGE!"
His campaign has already been trying to twist fallout from claims that Trump pined for the kind of generals that served Adolf Hitler into an argument that Harris believes all of his supporters are Nazis.
Biden's "garbage" remark may also offer Trump an opening to finally spin his way out of the backlash about Puerto Rico caused by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at the New York rally. "Probably he shouldn't have been there," Trump said of the comedian in an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity that aired Tuesday evening. His earlier comments that the event was "an absolute love-fest" had done nothing to defuse the controversy.
More broadly, a Biden comment that will be portrayed by pro-Trump media as contempt for the ex-president's supporters came at exactly the moment that Harris is trying to come across as a unifying figure to win over Republicans who are disaffected with Trump's extremism but are not yet ready to take the leap to vote for a Democrat.
"Here is my pledge to you," Harris said on night, at a rally on the Ellipse in Washington, the spot where Trump told his supporters to "fight like hell" before the invasion of the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021. "I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to make your life better."
The vice president went on: "To people who disagree with me, unlike Donald Trump, I don't believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I'll give them a seat at the table."
Clinton and Obama warned against demeaning Trump supporters
Whatever Biden meant, his remarks fly in the face of admonishments to Democrats from two other presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who pleaded with activists during the Democratic National Convention to take the political fight to Trump but not to disrespect his voters.
"Meet people where they are. I urge you not to demean them - treat them with respect, just the way you'd like them to treat you," Clinton said, urging delegates to make the case for the vice president with their neighbours carefully.
Obama addressed the risk that name calling could cause available voters to conclude that all politicians are the same. "A sense of mutual respect has to be part of our message. Our politics has become so polarized these days that all of us, across the political spectrum, seem so quick to assume the worst in others unless they agree with us on every single issue," he said. "We start thinking that the only way to win is to scold and shame and out yell the other side. And after a while, regular folks just tune out, or don't bother to vote at all."
Democrats are likely to regard a flap over a few ill-chosen words by the president, whether they were intended or not, as a triviality at a time when Harris is warning that the country could next week elect a man she blasted as a "a petty tyrant."
And verbal missteps by Biden and other Democrats pale by comparison to the often vulgar rhetoric and unhinged commentary of the Republican nominee, who recently made a crude comment about the anatomy of late pro-golf legend Arnold Palmer at the start of a rally. And while Biden's notoriously loose tongue got him into trouble, the significance of his remarks isn't as serious as a false claim by Trump in Pennsylvania on that Democrats are already cheating in the county of Lancaster, in what appeared to be his latest attempt to sow doubt on the fairness of the election in advance.
But the fallout of Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" comment in 2016 showed that imprecision and implied contempt can haunt candidates and their surrogates in the endgame of elections. In a neck-and-neck race that may be decided by mere thousands of votes in swing states, neither Harris nor Trump can afford mistakes. And the history of presidential elections is littered with incidents that appear insignificant at the time but can take on wider implications. Hinchcliffe's slamming of Puerto Rico is a classic example since it has left Trump scrambling to placate Puerto Rican voters in Lehigh County, an important area in Pennsylvania where he had hoped to eat into the Democratic vote.
Biden's diminished campaign role
The controversy will also likely renew speculation about Biden's future role in the campaign. He was, after all, forced to shelve his reelection bid following a disastrous debate performance on CNN in June that exposed his advanced age and sparked questions about his cognition. While he has appeared several times with Harris, he's been used sparingly by her campaign in recent weeks. And as CNN reported, his gaffes have caused responses - from eyerolls to outright anger - from some Harris campaign aides.
Last week, the president referred to Trump in New Hampshire and said, "We got to lock him up," before quickly adding, "Politically lock him up. Lock him out. That's what we have to do." The comment went viral on conservative talk radio and social media, as Republicans claimed it proved Trump's claims that Biden had weaponised the Justice Department against the GOP nominee. In Arizona on Friday, Biden referred to former Representative Gabby Giffords, who survived being shot in the head at a 2011 campaign event, in the past tense, suggesting she was no longer alive.
While aides have previously brushed off such slips as "vintage Biden," noting his history of gaffes and the president's proclivity to misspeak, they also acknowledge there's no room for error.
"We're in 'Do No Harm' mode," one official involved in discussions of Biden's role, said, according to reporting by CNN's Kayla Tausche, MJ Lee and Kevin Liptak.
That approach may have come off the rails.
- CNN