‘Are you joking?’ CNN analyst stomps all over segment on Biden’s ‘garbage’ remark
President Joe Biden took the spotlight off Kamala Harris’ campaign speech at the White House Ellipse attended by a record-breaking 75,000 people a week before the election.
“CNN This Morning” started off the 6 a.m. hour with a segment on the president’s remark, which Republicans say slurred Donald Trump’s supporters as “garbage.”
However, the White House has pushed back on this claim and has released a transcript that shows Biden stumbling over his words as he singles out a comedian who called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American,” Biden said, according to the White House transcript.
Axios correspondent Alex Thompson, who has published a series of highly critical articles on Biden in recent months, started off the segment by saying it was impossible to know what Biden actually meant by his comments.
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“The sad reality is because this president is no longer able to coherently and consistently articulate a message and that’s just the sad reality,” Thompson said. “That is why he’s no longer the nominee, because at the debate we all saw that very clearly, and it’s also why Kamala Harris does not want him on the trail. This is a guy that just last week referred to former Rep. Gabby Giffords in the past tense – she’s very much alive – on the trail. This is a guy that last week said that he wanted to throw Donald Trump in jail, and then very quickly tried to backtrack and said he just politically meant to lock him up.”
CNN senior political analyst Mark Preston suggested that Biden’s team should just embrace the remark and say he meant all of Trump’s racist supporters, but Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson said Trump draws much of his power praising his followers’ worst impulses.
“There is nothing more powerful for someone to hear a compliment – ‘someone likes me’ – and Donald Trump’s stronghold on Republican voters is because he came around and said, ‘The world tells you that you’re racist, the world tells you that you’re backward the world tells you that you’re Neanderthals, and I don’t think that – I like you,'” Anderson said.
Anderson compared the comment to “bulletin board material” coaches use to motivate their teams after their opponent criticizes them ahead of game, but CNN analyst Karen Finney lambasted the entire topic as ridiculous.
“I think this is so absurd,” Finney said. “You guys, if we’re going to sit here and compare crazy statements by old white guys, let’s please do that, because let’s talk about what Donald Trump went on to talk about, right? When he talks about s–thole countries and he talks about rapists and murderers, and accusing him of putting children in danger in Springfield because ‘they’re eating cats and dogs.’ I mean, Joe Biden misspoke, he said something stupid – he’s not at the top of the ticket. Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket.”
“He has been racist, misogynist, sexist – I mean, he’s been attacking everybody for everything,” Finney added. “I’m just saying, if we’re going to make a list, let’s do that.”
Thompson pushed back, saying they had both taken part in discussions on various Trump remarks, but Finney said there’s no comparison to the former president’s repeated attacks and Biden’s comment.
“It’s going to matter because the Trump campaign is going to make it matter,” she said. “But to my mind, there’s no comparison to that, based on the kinds of things that Donald Trump has been saying all campaign, every day, every single event that he doesn’t even apologize for any of it”
“I’m saying it’s absurd also because, by the way, Steve Bannon, fresh out of jail yesterday, started talking about election sabotage and violence and fomenting violence,” Finney added, “and we’re talking about where an apostrophe goes. Are you joking?”
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