Joe Biden is no longer able to speak in public. That makes him a poor surrogate for Kamala Harris' campaign, but he's also the president and therefore an extremely high-profile surrogate for the Democratic nominee.

This posed a problem for Harris on Tuesday night when Biden set out to criticize the dehumanizing rhetoric at a recent Trump rally and ended up spewing a garbled stream of words that perhaps dehumanized all Trump supporters as “trash,” perhaps but also not.

In doing so, conservatives expressed their collective horror at the spectacle of a US president demeaning Americans whose only sin was disagreeing with him politically. But even assuming that Republicans' tendentious reading of Biden is correct, their alleged outrage is not only hypocritical but damagingly misleading.

At worst, the president briefly denigrated conservative voters before denying that opinion in the next breath. During his time in office, Biden has now showered heavily Republican parts of the country with federal funding. In contrast, Trump unapologetically derides progressives and immigrants as “enemies” and “vermin” and is reportedly trying to block disaster aid to Democratic strongholds.

There is one candidate in the 2024 race that large segments of the American public view as less than human, and it is not Kamala Harris. The furor over Biden's incoherent statements obscures this reality.

Trump dehumanizes his political opponents without apology or equivocation. Biden doesn't.

On Sunday, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of trash” at a pro-Trump rally at Madison Square Garden. During a video call with Latino supporters Tuesday evening, Biden said of the incident:

And recently, a speaker at (Trump's) rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of trash.” Well, let me tell you something. I don't know – I – I don't know the Puerto Rican – that I know – or a Puerto Rican where I am – in my home state of Delaware, they are good, decent, honorable people.

The only trash I see floating out there is that of his supporters – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and un-American. It is in complete contradiction to everything we have done, everything we have been.

At least that's the official transcript of the White House remarks. Republicans argue what Biden is Strictly speaking said: “The only trash I see floating out there is his (i.e. Trump's) Supporter.” In other words, Biden says he called Hinchcliffe’s demonization of Puerto Rico trash, while Republicans say he called all Trump supporters trash.

It is impossible to distinguish “supporters” from “supporters” by ear. So there's no way to know for sure what Biden intended the moment those words left his lips. However, the surrounding context undermines the GOP's interpretation. Immediately after his controversial statement, the President said the following:

Now Trump has tried to divide the country by race, ethnicity, and anything that causes harm to distract them from the terrible things he has done and will continue to do. But Kamala Harris fought for all Americans and will be president for all America.

It's possible that Biden intended to 1) deride all Trump supporters as “trash” and then 2) immediately tout Harris' commitment to fighting human trash. But that seems unlikely to me, especially since the president has never said anything like that before in his half century of public life.

Whatever Biden intended, it is undeniable that his next sentences disproved the notion that Republican voters are “trash” whose interests should be ignored. And after his event was over, Biden insisted that his intention was simply to call Hinchcliffe's rhetoric “garbage.”

Trump, on the other hand, clearly believes that the Democrats represent “enemies from within” who must be defeated.

Last weekend on Fox News, Howard Kurtz told Trump that “enemies from within” was “a pretty threatening term when you're talking about other Americans.”

“I think it’s right,” Trump replied.

The Republican candidate also suggested that some of these enemies may need to be “fighted” by the “military,” compared his political opponents to “vermin” and claimed that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Just last week, Trump described America as “a garbage can for the world” and argued that other nations are dumping their human waste through immigration into the United States.

What's notable is that Trump's demonization of immigrants is not limited to those who lack legal status or even citizenship. He has baselessly accused legal U.S. citizens from Haiti of eating other people's pets and vowed to deport them. And he has described American citizens who came to this country through the diversity visa lottery as “horrible” and “the worst of the worst.”

Trump did not feel compelled to disavow any of these statements after they were made or to reassure the country that he wants to fight for every American. On the contrary, he is unabashedly committed to turning the power of the federal government against his political opponents and the millions of U.S. citizens whose presence in this country he detests.

There is not the slightest correspondence between Biden's rhetorical stance toward Republican voters and Trump's toward Democrats and immigrants. And a similar gap emerges when one examines each president's actual governance.

Trump doesn't just compare Americans he doesn't like to trash – he tries to treat them as such

During his time in office, Trump explicitly sought to help Americans who voted for him while spurning those who dared to oppose him, several administration officials told Politico's E&E News.

When deadly wildfires raged in California, Trump initially refused to authorize disaster relief because the state had voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, according to Mark Harvey, his administration's senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council. Harvey says Trump only changed his mind after he was shown the vote totals, which showed there were more Trump supporters in Orange County, California, than in Iowa.

Olivia Troye and Kevin Carroll, former Trump administration homeland security officials, both support Harvey's story.

“There was no way Trump wanted to give aid to California or Puerto Rico just for partisan reasons – because they didn’t vote for him,” Carroll told The Guardian earlier this month. Carroll went on to say that his former boss, then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, had to “twist Trump's arm” to get him to release federal funding to the territories after the wildfires and Hurricane Maria, respectively.

Trump also withheld millions in wildfire aid from Washington in September 2020 because the state's governor criticized him, and the aid was ultimately approved only after Biden took office.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' memoir lends further credence to these claims. In 2019, after Hurricane Michael devastated the Florida Panhandle, DeSantis called on then-President Trump to order the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay 100 percent of the state's recovery costs, rather than the usual 75 percent.

According to DeSantis' book, Trump responded: “They love me in the Panhandle. I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do you need?”

Trump called on FEMA to pay 100 percent of Florida's cleanup costs. And yet just two months earlier, he threatened to veto a bill that would have extended the same courtesy to Puerto Rico. And his administration withheld $20 billion in hurricane relief funds from the island for an extended period, while Trump reportedly told Kelly and then-Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney that he didn't want “a single dollar left.” Puerto Rico goes.” .”

The Biden administration has shown no similar favoritism. On the contrary, her response to Hurricane Helene, which devastated many conservative communities on the East Coast, has drawn praise from Republican officials.

Meanwhile, Biden's signature legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act — actually funneled disproportionate funds to red states. And Biden has also committed significant federal funding to improving infrastructure in conservative-leaning rural areas.

Trump supporters expressing outrage at Biden's words are committing more than just hypocrisy

In summary, a presidential candidate is associated with a man who once might have momentarily called Republican voters trash — before immediately disavowing that idea and after dutifully championing the interests of conservatives during his time as president regions had deployed. The candidate herself, meanwhile, said: “I strongly reject any criticism of people based on who they vote for” and “I believe that my work is about representing all people, whether they support me or not. “

The other presidential candidate has personally repeatedly and unapologetically compared large swaths of the American public to “vermin” and “garbage” after attempting to choke off federal aid to Democratic wildfire victims and vowing to prosecute his political opponents next year pursue the chance he gets.

Any official who condemns Harris for somehow contributing to the dehumanization of ordinary Americans is not only committing hypocrisy, but is completely misleading voters about a question of vital importance: which presidential candidate would represent the least favored segments of the American population treat – and which ones don’t? public like garbage.