President Joe Biden called Trump supporters “garbage” on Tuesday night, although the White House and its allies frantically added apostrophes to his comments, caught on video, to narrow the disparagement down to one insult comic. 

Former President Barack Obama chided black men who have yet to commit to Vice President Kamala Harris, accusing them of misogyny during a Pennsylvania campaign stop: “You just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.” (Nearly 1 in 5 black men actually voted for Trump over Biden in 2020, and that was before inflation.)

Michelle Obama, the former first lady, directed her ire at men more broadly. “To anyone out there thinking about sitting out this election or voting for Donald Trump or a third-party candidate in protest because you’re fed up, let me warn you. Your rage does not exist in a vacuum,” she said in Michigan. “If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women will become collateral damage for your rage.”

PATHS TO VICTORY FOR HARRIS AND TRUMP IN 2024

“And to the women listening, we have every right to demand that the men in our lives do better by us,” she added. “Our lives are worth more than their anger and disappointment. We are more than just baby-making vessels. If you are a woman who lives in a household of men that don’t listen to you or value your opinion, just remember that your vote is a private matter. Regardless of the political views of your partner, you get to choose, you get to use your judgment and cast your vote for yourself and the women in your life.”

“This election isn’t a referendum on Trump,” Never-Trump ex-Republican congressman Joe Walsh wrote on X. “It’s a referendum on us. It’s a referendum on the American people.”

If they vote the wrong way, the defenders of democracy tell us, the American people fail the test.

“They’re not taking the same exam,” CNN’s Van Jones said of an alleged Trump-Harris double standard after the vice president underperformed at the network’s recent town hall. “He gets to be lawless. She has to be flawless.”

Michelle Obama said much the same thing while stumping for Harris. “We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs,” she maintained. “But for Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.”

“We are in a moment, I would argue, which is as important a test of citizenship as at any moment I can think of in American history,” historian Jon Meacham said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe after concluding he could see no “upside” for a center-right voter casting his or her ballot for Trump.

“Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort,” the German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote. “If that is the case, would it not be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?”

Harris has, for her part, tried to distance herself from these kinds of comments. “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for,” she said Wednesday at Joint Base Andrews before hitting the campaign trail. “As you heard in my speech last night and continuously throughout my career, I believe that the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not.”

“We have to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms. It is time to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the fear and division. It is time for a new generation of leadership in America,” Harris said the night before in a speech billed as her closing argument. “I am ready to offer that leadership as the next president of the United States of America.”

“I pledge to listen to experts, to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make, and to people who disagree with me. Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table,” she said.  

But enough of Harris’s supporters have expressed disdain for large portions of the electorate, similar to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “deplorables” remark, that it is difficult for this to break through. Biden’s “garbage” comment broke on the same night as her Ellipse speech.

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Republicans have wasted no time in highlighting Biden’s broadside.

“Joe Biden finally said what he and Kamala really think of our supporters. He called them ‘garbage.’ And they mean it,” Trump said at a rally on Wednesday. “My response to Joe and Kamala is very simple: You can’t lead America if you don’t love Americans.”