When Biden called Trump supporters ‘garbage,’ it gave the media one last chance to play defense for Democrats.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look back at the media’s attempts to downplay Republicans’ thoughtful criticism of Democrats throughout the 2024 race, and we cover more media misses.
One Final ‘Republicans Pounce’ for the 2024 Election
When comedian Tony Hinchcliffe joked at former president Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage,” it was well accepted throughout the mainstream media that the comments were bad and hateful and could alienate voters – even though the Trump campaign immediately disavowed the joke.
But when President Biden followed that up by calling Trump’s millions of supporters “garbage,” the media reflexively defended the president, whose team has gone to great lengths to argue his comment was not directed at Trump’s millions of supporters.
NPR tells readers, “Republicans Pounce on Biden’s ‘Garbage’ Remarks.”
That headline is just the latest entry in a long media tradition of framing legitimate Republican opposition to Democrats’ misbehavior as somehow undeserved or unreasonable.
In this scenario, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell was seemingly upset that Trump and his supporters are giving Biden “no grace” for the insult.
“Former President Donald Trump was in North Carolina earlier, and tonight, he is also in Wisconsin. He landed in Green Bay just a short time ago and then pulled this campaign stunt, speaking to reporters from a garbage truck, proof that he and his supporters are giving no grace to a gaffe by President Biden where he, in his explanation, inadvertently called Trump supporters garbage,” she said, adding that Biden’s comment was “in response to that racist joke about floating garbage told at a Trump rally just last weekend.”
Politico called Biden’s comments a “major blunder” but then still said only that “critics say” the comments targeted Trump supporters. Politico Playbook co-author and White House correspondent Eugene Daniels was tapped to explain “why the message was confusing.
Yet in the clearest evidence yet that the message was not confusing, the Associated Press caught the White House red-handed when it reported that Biden’s aides had edited the transcript of his remarks despite pushback from stenographers who said the change was a breach of protocol.
In the original transcript prepared by the stenographers of the Voto Latino campaign call, Biden was quoted as saying: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
As the remarks started circulating online and receiving pushback, the White House Press Office released a transcript of Biden’s comments that added an apostrophe, changing the quote’s meaning to read “supporter’s” rather than “supporters.”
The White House claimed Biden was offering a criticism of comedian Hinchcliffe and that he was not insulting Trump’s millions of supporters.
An internal email from the White House Stenography Office obtained by the Associated Press and Fox News called the press office’s change “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”
But the situation was hardly the worst “Republicans pounce” this election season.
That award goes to Newsweek, which reported on the first assassination attempt against Trump like this: “MAGA responds with outrage after Donald Trump injured at Pennsylvania rally.”
And Sky News was right there with them. “Nothing justified an assassination bid — but did Trump play a part in changing the rules of engagement?” — a headline so bad that the outlet quickly revised it to read, “US politics is laced with malevolence and division — it needs a reset.”
Trump also “pounced” at his debate against President Joe Biden, who “bombed,” according to Politico.
At the start of the year, Republicans pounced on the killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley by an illegal immigrant, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Top Georgia Republicans quickly tied the killing of a student on the University of Georgia campus to President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, decrying what they see as lax border controls after a suspect from Venezuela was charged with murder,” the outlet reported at the time.
And of course, yet another offense from Politico reads: “Republicans pounce after Netanyahu protesters burn U.S. flags – and wave Hamas ones instead.”
The outlet later changed the headline to say Republicans “condemn” rather than “pounce.”
Headline Fail of the Week
The New York Times reports: “Trump Assails Liz Cheney and Imagines Guns ‘Shooting at Her.’”
The headline, as NR’s Rich Lowry noted, isn’t technically inaccurate, but it leaves out the fact that Trump was talking about a hypothetical battlefield scenario.
“It’s bad on the merits that Trump talks in these terms, and it’s foolish politically because it gives the other side fodder, but, still, he didn’t say what they allege he said, and the truth should matter,” Lowry wrote.
Media Misses
• ABC’s George Stephanopoulos is playing Chicken Little ahead of Election Day, claiming “No election since the Civil War has posed such a test of our constitutional system. Whether to accept election results and the peaceful transfer of power has never been on the ballot like this. The stakes in this election are as high as it gets.”
• Radio host Tavis Smiley appeared on a CNN panel Thursday and claimed Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance has “mommy issues,” after Vance recently said during an interview with Joe Rogan that Democrats want to keep testosterone levels down so that people don’t become more conservative. Rogan had introduced the topic by asking Vance if he was aware of “all these studies that basically connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics.” Smiley chalked the comments up to Vance’s “mommy issues.” “It’s been fascinating for me to watch how this has played out on the campaign trail,” Smiley said. “And because of those issues, he has subjected women across this country to all his bad ideas and all his bad policy.”
“Maya Angelou once told me that ‘processing pain without perpetuating pain is rough business.’ So if you got mommy issues and you make everyone else in the country subject to that, that’s a real problem,” he added.
• Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is not ready to let go of her claims of “voter suppression” in the Peach State – even as it records record early-voting turnout. Abrams appeared on CNN to discuss the increase in early voting. “While we are excited about who is showing up, we have to understand that turnout does not mean there is not voter suppression activity,” Abrams claimed. Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger rejected Abrams’s claims in a statement to Fox News: “Once again, Stacey Abrams is lying about Georgia’s elections, and over three million voters who have already voted know not to take her seriously. She’s cost the state millions and it’s time for her to get real: Georgia has the leads the nation in voter accessibility and convenience and we run the most secure elections in the country.”