2024 Election Updates: Biden Blames GOP Linking ‘Trash’ to Trump Supporters

President Joe Biden drew criticism from Republicans over comments he made during a Voto Latino campaign call Tuesday night in which his language appeared to refer to supporters of former President Donald Trump as “trash.”

“Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage,'” Biden said, according to a video clip on CNN.

He went on to call Puerto Ricans “good, decent, honorable people” and then added, “The only trash I see out there are his supporters.”

The comment was followed by: “His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and un-American. It’s completely contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.”

Republicans quickly pounced on the comment, comparing it to Hillary Clinton’s:basket of bad thingscomment in 2016.

Senator Marco Rubio broke the news to Trump on stage during his re-election campaign in Allentown, Philadelphia.

Trump responded: “Remember, Hillary said ‘regrettable.'”

“It didn’t work,” he continued. “I think Trash is worse, right?”

Trump campaign national press secretary Caroline Leavitt responded: “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris hate America and don’t deserve four more years. Kamala must answer for this shameful attack on tens of millions of Americans.”

A new controversy emerged a week before the election, on the night Vice President Kamala Harris delivered her final campaign address at the Ellipse in Washington, DC.

“The President called the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally ‘trash,'” a White House spokesman said.

The ABC News transcript of the White House speech includes an apostrophe at the end of the word “supporter,” but it is unclear from video footage of Biden’s remarks whether the president meant the word in the possessive case.

A Harris campaign spokesman referred ABC News to an official White House statement.

Biden soon responded with a statement publish on Xsaying it was the “hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by a Trump supporter” that he called “garbage.”

– Justin R. Gomez of ABC News