Aaron Blake is a "senior political reporter" at The Washington Post, for a section they call "The Fix." Well, Blake's pathetic attempt to help Joe Biden paper over what he quite obviously said is an attempt at "the fix," but it doesn't work.
Biden said "Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage...the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American."
The Washington Post headline:
Did Biden call Trump supporters ‘garbage’? It comes down to an apostrophe.
Republicans have long strained for a new Hillary Clinton-"deplorables" moment, but Biden’s defense is entirely plausible. [Emphasis mine.]
Blake recalled how Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters a "basket of deplorables" may have kept her from winning in 2016. But Blake insists the Republicans can't make this stick:
Republicans’ latest entry on the eve of the 2024 campaign — President Joe Biden’s “garbage” comment Tuesday night — is more plausible than most as their hoped-for “deplorables” moment. But it’s still not nearly as ironclad as Clinton’s comments.
And Biden’s increasing tendency to stumble over his words, which marred these very comments, makes it entirely plausible that he didn’t intend to tar large numbers of Trump supporters — as he soon clarified that he hadn’t.
It may come down to the placement of an apostrophe, and it’s worth a parse.
No. It’s not. It’s about as plausible as trying to argue that when Trump said you can grab ‘em by the pussy, he meant a cat. The Biden camp is trying to transcribe it this way: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
Blake claimed this version was "entirely plausible. The context is clearly Biden talking about Hinchcliffe’s remark. Biden often speaks in non sequiturs, failing to finish his thoughts and shifting course midsentence, including in the Delaware comments that preceded his “garbage” remark. It’s basically the entire premise of Dana Carvey’s Biden impersonation on Saturday Night Live.”
So they're using Biden's infirmity to spin out of this mess.
As Biden himself often says, “I mean what I say; the problem is that I sometimes say all that I mean.”
Just last week, he made a comment about locking Trump up — the kind of rhetoric Democrats have long criticized Trump and his supporters for — before catching himself.
Somehow, despite all of the Democrat prosecutors trying to lock up Trump, this was spun as an innocent booboo, and not a political objective.
It's not helping Blake when Chris Cillizza -- his former colleague at "The Fix" -- said Blake's take was laughable.
Also the attempt to transcribe this by the White House as “supporter’s” as opposed to “supporters” — which he clearly says — is laughable. https://t.co/JEDvpHLDcF
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) October 30, 2024
Responding to Cillizza, Michael LaRosa, Jill Biden’s former press secretary, the White House’s attempt to transcribe "supporters" as "supporter’s," was "a bonehead move and one they’ve been caught making before."
