White House claims Biden does not think Trump supporters are ‘garbage’ despite his remarks

Jean-Pierre refused “to litigate 2016” or comment on the comparison, she said. Jean-Pierre said that Biden "was not speaking about Trump supporters. He was not treating them as a whole. He was not speaking about people who support a different candidate; that is not what he was doing and he clarified that in his statement last night. That was not his intent. He wanted to be very clear about that,” Jean-Pierre said, insisting that Biden was “speaking about comments that were made by the comedian,” referring to Tony Hinchcliffe's jokes at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday.

Jean-Pierre suggested people should be talking about “the demonization of Latinos. That's what we heard of a community, by the way," she said. "You know, and I know you all know this, Puerto Ricans are Americans, and he wanted to make sure that, you know, we speak out against hateful rhetoric,” she said, repeating that Biden was not “talking about Trump supporters, absolutely not as a whole. Absolutely not.”

In a video call with Voto Latino, Biden endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris while condemning Hinchliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico being “a floating island of garbage” during his routine. “The only garbage I see floating out there are his supporters," Biden said on the call. Later the White House released a transcript showing an apostrophe in supporters so it read "supporter's."

Numerous reporters also asked Jean-Pierre if Biden was reading from “a script” when he made the remarks about Trump supporters being “garbage” because he appeared to be reading from a prepared text. “I'm not going to get into specifics here,” Jean-Pierre said. “It's not unusual for a president or vice president or any elected official to have notes in front of them when they're speaking to a crowd or to a group of people. That is not unusual,” she continued.

“What I can say is the president wanted to make sure that his words were not being taken out of context, and so he wanted to clarify, and that's what he heard from the president. He was very aware, and I would say, I think it's really important that you have a president that cares about clarifying what they said.”

Biden backtracked on his insult in a post on X that declared he was only referring to Hinchcliffe with his remarks: “That’s all I meant to say.”

The Kamala Harris campaign was forced to do clean up on Wednesday with both Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, as well as campaign surrogates, repeatedly asked about the remark.