Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump posed in a garbage truck during a campaign stop in Wisconsin on Wednesday, in an apparent dig at outgoing US President Joe Biden’s disparaging comments about Trump voters.
Biden called Trump supporters “garbage” in a Zoom call with activists on Tuesday. He later clarified that he was condemning a joke made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe – during an earlier Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York – who compared Puerto Rico to “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.”
Supporters of the Democratic Party candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, have described Hinchcliffe’s joke as “racist.” The comedian insists that the joke was taken out of context.
Trump mocked Biden and Harris as he appeared in the battleground state of Wisconsin sitting in the cabin of a garbage truck decorated with American flags and campaign slogans.
“How do you like my garbage truck?” the former president asked reporters, leaning out of the passenger seat window. “This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden.”
Trump later gave a speech in Green Bay while wearing a bright-orange vest. “I have to begin by saying, 250 million Americans are not garbage,” he told the crowd, accusing the Democrats of spreading hate towards his supporters.
“For the past nine years, Kamala and her party have called us racists, bigots, fascists, deplorables, irredeemables, Nazis, and they called me Hitler,” he said, drawing boos from the audience. “They’ve bullied you, they’ve demonized us, they’ve censored us, they’ve deplatformed us and they weaponized the power of our own government against all of us,” he added.
Businessman and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a Trump ally, posted a video of himself emptying bins in a garbage truck and wearing a green vest.
Harris has distanced herself from Biden’s comments. “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for,” she told the BBC, promising that, if elected, she would be “a president for all Americans, including those that don’t vote for me.”
Both Republicans and Democrats have increasingly accused each other of resorting to hateful rhetoric throughout the highly contentious election cycle, as voters are set to go to the polls on November 5. Trump himself has been criticized for using brash and vulgar language against his opponents, most recently for describing his rivals as an “enemy from within.”