With less than a week to go until the US presidential election, Donald Trump has posed as a sanitation worker in a bin truck to ridicule his Democrat opponents in the wake of President Joe Biden’s highly contentious “garbage supporters” comment.
Earlier this week, the Trump campaign was the subject of backlash after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe joked on stage at a Trump rally that Puerto Rico is “a floating island of garbage”, which some Democrat opponents and media commentators deemed offensive.
As this controversy was unfolding, Democrat President Joe Biden took to CNN to slam Trump for the comments at his rally, saying: “Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico ‘a floating island of garbage.’ Well, let me tell you something…The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”
Biden’s remarks have since caused uproar, with the Trump campaign seizing on the comments in the final days of the election.
In the battleground state of Wisconsin, Trump appeared on the campaign trail dressed as a sanitation worker in a bin truck emblazoned with his signature “Make America Great Again” logo, telling the media “How do you like my garbage truck? This truck is in honour of Kamala [Harris] and Joe Biden.”
Speaking following the stunt, Trump pushed back on Biden’s remarks, and also those of his opponent Kamala Harris, who has compared Trump to a fascist and a Nazi.
“I have to begin by saying 250 million Americans are not garbage,” he said.
“This week, Kamala has been comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history, and now, speaking on a call for her campaign last night, crooked Joe Biden finally said what he and Kamala really think of our supporters. He called them garbage. No way!”
In the midst of the controversy, Biden attempted to walk back the remarks, claiming he had misspoken.
“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,” Biden posted on X.
“His demonization 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.”
Nevertheless, the incident has many Democrats worried, with one CNN headline reading “Biden may have handed Trump a big assist with his ‘garbage’ gaffe.”
Some have compared Biden’s comment to Hillary Clinton’s infamous and disastrous gaffe during the 2016 election, when she called half of Donald Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables” who were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.”
Those comments led to considerable backlash for the Clinton campaign, as she was accused of attacking a significant section of the voting public.