US President Joe Biden on Tuesday referred to supporters of former US president Donald Trump as “garbage” during an election campaign call.
Speaking in a video call with VotoLatino, a nonprofit, Biden addressed a controversy that erupted after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at a New York rally for Trump on Sunday joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden said. “His [Trump’s] demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and it’s un-American.”
Photo: Reuters
The White House later said in a statement that Biden was referring to Trump’s rhetoric, not to his supporters.
“The president referred to the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally as ‘garbage,’” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said.
Biden later on social media personally clarified what he said.
“Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage — which is the only word I can think of to describe it,” he wrote on X. “His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That’s all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don’t reflect who we are as a nation.”
US Vice President Kamala Harris is locked in a race against Trump for the White House, with the election on Tuesday next week.
Trump called Biden’s comments “terrible.”
“These people. Terrible, terrible — terrible to say a thing like that,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
He compared the comments to when former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton — running against Trump for the presidency in 2016 — said that half of the Republican’s supporters were “deplorables.”
“Garbage, I think is worse, right?” Trump added.
Separately, voting system passwords were mistakenly put on the Colorado Secretary of State’s Web site for several months before being spotted and taken down, state election officials said on Tuesday.
Election officials learned last week that a spreadsheet that held the passwords in a hidden tab was available online.
The passwords were only one of two that are needed to access any component of Colorado’s voting systems and are just one part of a layered security system, Jack Todd, spokesman for the Colorado Secretary of State’s office, said in a statement.
The two passwords are “kept in separate places and held by different parties,” he said.
“This is not a security threat,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in an interview on 9News.
Griswold said that her office was investigating, that not all of the passwords in the spreadsheet were active and there was no reason to believe there had been a security breach.
Griswold said workers are changing passwords, and looking at access logs and chain of custody books.
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