Did Joe Biden call white men garbage?
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Executive summary
There is no credible evidence in the reporting provided that President Joe Biden said the phrase “white men are garbage” or otherwise directly called “white men” garbage; the contested remark in late October 2024 involved the word “garbage” in reference to rhetoric at a Trump rally and was variously transcribed as referring to “his supporters” or to “his supporter’s” rhetoric, with the White House insisting Biden meant the latter (i.e., the comedian’s words), not an entire demographic [1] [2] [3].
1. What Biden actually said on the call, as captured and circulated
Video and stenographer transcripts show Biden, during a virtual call with Latino activists, saying something like “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters” followed by criticizing the “demonization of Latinos,” language that many listeners interpreted as equating Trump supporters with “garbage” [4] [5] [6].
2. How the White House responded and altered the public record
The White House quickly issued a clarified transcript that inserted an apostrophe—rendering the phrase as “his supporter’s”—and White House spokespeople said Biden was condemning the hateful rhetoric of a specific pro‑Trump comedian at Madison Square Garden, not millions of people who back Donald Trump [1] [7] [3].
3. Why that punctuation mattered: competing interpretations
The presence or absence of a single apostrophe mattered politically and semantically: the stenography office’s initial transcript reflected the plural “supporters,” which critics said showed Biden had called Trump supporters “garbage,” while the edited White House version with “supporter’s” was presented as evidence Biden meant the comedian’s words were garbage—an interpretation the White House pushed to defuse the uproar [8] [9] [10].
4. Pushback, investigations and partisan framing
Republicans seized on the initial phrasing to accuse Biden of insulting a large swath of Americans and even opened inquiries into whether the White House violated record‑keeping rules by revising an official transcript; Democrats and the White House defended Biden’s clarification that he was denouncing racist rhetoric aimed at Puerto Rico and Latinos [11] [7] [2].
5. Independent reporting and the video evidence
Major outlets that obtained the video showed Biden making the remark on the call and later tweeting that he’d “referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter … as garbage,” a public statement that aligns with the White House clarification but does not erase the fact that the unscripted audio/video allowed multiple reasonable readings [4] [2] [3].
6. Direct answer to the question asked
Based on the reporting provided, Biden did not call “white men” garbage; the dispute centers on whether he called “his supporters” (understood as Trump supporters) garbage or whether he was calling the specific supporter’s rhetoric garbage—a distinction the White House sought to make through a transcript edit and public remarks [1] [8] [7]. None of the cited accounts report Biden using the words “white men,” and the administration’s own statement explicitly framed his target as the hateful rhetoric at a rally rather than a demographic group [2] [3].
7. The broader context and why this still matters
The episode became a flashpoint because it intersected with tensions about political civility, transcript integrity, and campaign messaging days before an election; opponents argued the edit was an attempt to rewrite the record, while defenders said the clarification corrected a misreading of what Biden was condemning—an argument that leaves room for genuine disagreement about tone and intent even if the specific claim that Biden called “white men” garbage is unsupported by the sources here [8] [7] [9].