Democrats and their willing minions in the media seized on a comedian’s joke during President Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden. “Racist!” they shouted, trying to back up their comparison to a Nazi rally at MSG in 1939 that wasn’t even held at the same location. It’s been a slender reed at best, but they’re desperate to steer some momentum toward Kamala Harris since all the energy seems to be going toward Trump.
Kamala Harris then gave a massive graduation speech in DC, and she’s already created up-to-date problems for herself. It was – again – mostly about Trump, not about what she would bring to the table to lend a hand anything. Furthermore, the location said a lot. Instead of standing among ordinary Americans in a swing state, she stood in the most liberal area of the country, in the middle of a swamp, surrounded by, in all likelihood, a lot of government workers. Trump went to people in a very blue area, she went to her base, which doesn’t give you up-to-date voters.
But then Joe Biden came and called the Trump supporters “garbage” – in the middle of their speech. Then that was what dominated the news, not anything Harris had to say from her final pitch. If Biden wanted to get them done, he couldn’t plan it better. There were two massive data points that showed how bad things went.
First, there was evidence of how independents reacted when they heard Biden’s comment. Fox News had a focus group of Democrats, Republicans and independents conduct a “vote test” of reactions to what Biden said. The blue lines represent Democrats, yellow independents and red Republicans. You can see that the yellow line is basically closer to Republicans across the board, but then it breaks off when Biden says that.
The White House immediately recognized it was a problem and released several transcripts purporting to claim he was talking about the comic and not Trump supporters in general, but no one was buying it.
READ MORE: Biden and WH are desperately trying – and failing – to clarify his comments calling Trump supporters trash
Then as Matt Margolis at our sister site PJ Media observed, Google trends also showed the problem for Harris.
Google Trends numbers show search interest relative to the peak for a specific region and time. A value of 100 means highest popularity, 50 means half as popular, and 0 means there was not enough data for the term. Here is the Google Trends graph comparing searches for “Puerto Rico trash” and “Biden-Trump supporters trash.”
So not only did the comedian’s comment turn out not to generate as much interest as Democrats and the media might have liked, but it was completely overtaken by the focus on the Biden comment.
It was also trending on X with over a million, so a lot of people were talking about it.
#Garbage Still trending #1 after 2am West Coast Time! pic.twitter.com/7kW0CHHfIR
— CaliforniaIsCancer (@jp93274) October 30, 2024
It definitely beat KamalaDefendsDemocracy, which had a relatively dismal number.
Garbage is trendy now #KamalaDefendsDemocracy
The joy is gone. pic.twitter.com/YIFhYH7biG
– P (@Payton1pay) October 30, 2024
Then the next day, Trump capped it all off with the brilliant garbage truck troll, which also spread all over social media and added another day to point out how the Democrats have demonized millions of Americans. CNN even skipped talking about Kamala Harris to report what Trump said from the truck.
READ MORE: How It’s Done: Watch Trump Give a Master Class in Trolling Joe and Kamala Amid ‘GarbageGate’
HOT TAKES: Reaction to Trump’s garbage truck troll is great while Democrats deal with it and seethe
Harris just can’t keep up, and that’s the real final statement.
