FACT CHECK: No, President Biden Didn’t Call Donald Trump Supporters “Garbage”

The viral lie—spread to hundreds of millions by Trump and Elon Musk and the subject of a bizarre publicity stunt by Trump aimed at making voters forget what happened at Madison Square Garden—is silly.

ABOVE: Donald Trump, looking particularly orange in a dump truck he struggled to gain access to in what has since become a viral moment concerning his health.

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Jonathan Swift once said, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.”

This sentiment is often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain (usually as, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”), which is both hilariously ironic and, one supposes, proof of concept.

But some lies are so silly that they not only shouldn’t have a horse to ride on but not a pot to piss in, either—let alone above-the-digital fold coverage at both CNN and the New York Times (which Proof will not link to, on principle)—and the notion that the historically mild, milquetoast childhood-stutterer Joe Biden just called the 75 million or so supporters of Donald Trump straight-up “garbage” is about as silly as lies get.

If you believe it, you’re not, to be clear, garbage. But you’re almost certainly borderline media illiterate. You’re unaware of the years-long history of Donald Trump and Elon Musk editing the statements of others for partisan and business advantage and know nothing of how the sitting President of the United States has spoken for many decades.

Frankly, shame on you.

So what did President Biden actually say? Well, responding to a racist, misogynistic, anti-semitic, and Islamophobic performance the Trump campaign carefully loaded into a teleprompter for handpicked Trump opener Tony Hinchcliffe at Madison Sqaure Garden this past weekend, the President of the United States did exactly what one is supposed to do (as opposed to, say, inciting an armed rebellion against America) if one has taken the presidential Oath of Office: he stood up for his people, his people being all Americans and particularly those from the vulnerable minority groups that Donald Trump likes to target both directly and through proxies like Tony Hinchcliffe.

Specifically, asked about Hinchcliffe delivering the Trump campaign-approved line calling Puerto Rico—whose citizens are American—a “floating island of garbage,” the president of the residents of that island said, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his [Donald Trump] supporter’s—his [Hinchcliffe’s], his [sic] demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and it’s un-American.”

That sentence again, this time clean: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s—his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and it’s un-American.”

It was a succinct denunciation of what Hinchcliffe had said. And it was generous, too—as it didn’t even target Hinchcliffe himself (which would have been warranted) but simply his despicable “comedy” routine that slurred and slandered literally more than half the population of America at one point or another in its several-minute run-time.

While the statement was marred, as usual, by Biden’s well-known stuttering—thus the two instances of the word “his”—it was also unambiguously referring to Donald Trump supporter Hinchcliffe’s comedy stylings.

So what did Trump (amplified by Musk) do? He edited the hell out of what Biden said.

First, he cut the sentence in two.

Then he changed the punctuation.

Then he eliminated the context.

Then he turned it into a MAGA rallying cry aimed at echoing statements made about certain MAGA voters in 2016 by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (a comment that Clinton specifically prefaced by saying it only applied to “half” of Trump voters, but which was immediately treated by Trump and the media as applying to all).

Then he turned the whole shebang into a lucrative merchandising opportunity.

Then he turned it into an embarrassing publicity stunt.

Then he leaned on his prospective future co-president Elon Musk to spread it halfway across the world on the fastest digital steed the South African emerald-mine nepo baby could find. Here’s the butchered version of what President Biden said that Trump and Musk gleefully spoon-fed to their supporters, in doing so not just lying to them all but presuming their lack of curiosity about the truth:

“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

Never mind that Biden never talks that way—even if you dislike him, if you know how he speaks, you know that ain’t it—and never mind that he certainly wouldn’t talk that way just days before an election. But the truth is, Donald Trump has long publicly revelled in the idea that his voters are “poorly educated” low-information citizens, so it’s unsurprising that he would tell them President Biden said something he didn’t and wouldn’t say and equally unsurprising that they would not only believe Dear Leader but whip themselves into a frenzy over any merchandising opportunities, publicity stunts, or supposedly justified rejoinders that Trump and Musk’s lies might provoke.

What’s more surprising is that even a single journalist fell for this nonsense.

CNN said that the situation had created a “political mess” for Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic nominee for president, while the New York Times chose to call Biden’s entirely accurate, fair assessment of the Hinchcliffe routine a “gaffe” and an “ill-timed flub”—in composition terms, “weasel words” and “squishy phrases” that kept the Times from having to acknowledge Biden hadn’t actually said anything wrong, merely something Trump and Musk were able to unscrupulously make some hay with.

Of course, all that hay would be meaningless if only already-in-the-bag Trump voters heard the butchered version of what President Biden said, so Trump and Musk were counting on CNN and the Times and other media outlets using clickbait headlines and weasel words to tease their readers into believing that maybe, just maybe, Biden had just gifted a “basket of deplorables” moment to Trump and, with it, the election.

What these media outlets certainly did not do is schedule Mr. Trump for the round-the-clock criticism he should have come in for after he donned an orange safety vest, awkwardly tried to enter a garbage truck, and proceeded to deliver an entire rally speech while wearing the said vest—all on the presumption that he was standing up for his “garbage” people… a turn of phrase that, it really bears repeating, he had coined.

ABOVE: This is profoundly embarrassing. And unpresidential. Remember that when a Black man was POTUS, MAGAs skewered him for wearing a tan suit. Yes, really.

It was yet another example of Trump turning his own lie into a stunt. The last one was a lie he pulled off 4chan claiming that Kamala Harris never worked at a McDonald’s for one summer in D.C.—while she was in college—many decades ago. But she did.

Nevertheless, Trump did this, anyway:

ABOVE: Donald Trump talking to media and staffers pretending to be McDonald’s customers during a bizarre stunt in Pennsylvania in which Trump pretended to be a minimum-wage employee while refusing to back an increase in the minimum wage.

If you think, for even a moment, that Trump’s McDonald’s stunt had anything to do with helping the American people live better lives rather than—yet again—centering Trump’s obsession with getting media coverage (no matter what for), see this photo:

If Trump’s McDonald’s stunt was more embarrassing—and unpresidential—than his dump truck stunt (though it’s hard to say which is worse, as again, both implicitly make light of all the serious issues American families are focused on in the run-up to this election), it’s because the McDonald’s wasn’t even open, Trump didn’t actually serve any customers, the store’s owner is infamous for opposing paying his employees a living wage, and because Trump thereafter claimed that a crowd reporters said was 3,000 strong actually had nearly 30,000 people in it. Trump playacting as a minimum-wage employee while refusing to back even a one-cent raise in the minimum wage was merely another soupçon of hypocrisy atop what was already, by then, a mountain of it.

Remarkably, only one media outlet appeared to treat Trump’s spin in a dump truck as the dumpster fire it was: right-wing digital media outlet The Drudge Report, which has been no friend to Trump in recent years. But its headline was timely and on point:

And yes, that is a real photograph. Here is the Getty Images version:

The orange figure above is the one who says that hostile foreign autocrats take him—and no other American—seriously.

All this, finally, is why America may soon collapse. Because a POTUS who said a very reasonable thing had that thing transmogrified into contemptible disinformation by two unscrupulous far-right billionaires, and a bunch of corporate media outlets under the thumb of unscrupulous billionaires ran with what they saw as a very lucrative non-story-cum-story. As ever, all the money in the situation laid on the side of the lie, not the truth. The occasional independent media publication—The Drudge Report and, if it can be said, Proof—getting to the truth of the matter notwithstanding, it really seems as though the truth of any matter is currently the least valuable currency in America.

But you want to know something that is true? Just last month, Donald Trump declared at a rally that “the people that surround [Harris], they’re scum—they’re scum—and they want to take down our country. They’re absolute garbage.”

That really did happen.

And you know who just analogized America—the entire United States—to a “garbage can” in his “closing argument” to voters?

If you guessed Donald Trump, you’re right.

Every MAGA accusation is a confession. That’s a maxim even Twain couldn’t gainsay.

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