Yesterday, President Joe Biden made a comment to which Republicans are taking elaborate offense. What he said is a string of words lending themselves to two very different interpretations. Before I supply my own interpretation, you should watch the video for yourself, if you haven’t already:
Biden was rebuking a comedic performance at a Trump rally over the weekend, in which the comedian, playing to the crowd, disparaged Latinos in general and Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” Biden, feeling inexplicably compelled to add his voice to the story, asserted, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
The controversy here is that Republicans believe, or at least claim, that there was no apostrophe in the remark. And it is true, in the literal sense that you cannot vocalize an apostrophe. And so we are left with two different interpretations of the syllables uttered by the president. The Democratic interpretation is that Biden was saying “supporter’s.” The Republican interpretation insists he meant “supporters.”
Which interpretation is correct? There is obviously no way to know for sure. My general predisposition is that, when a speaker utters words off the cuff that are open to different interpretations, and only one of those interpretations is wildly offensive, we should generally assume he intended the less offensive version. Knowing what is inside a person’s mind when they say something is impossible.
Conservatives generally agree with this approach — at least when the speaker is a fellow conservative.
Last month, National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry gave an interview in which he uttered the n-word. Lowry’s defense is that he was trying to say “Haitian migrants” and tripped over his syllables. The charge by his critics, which I don’t find persuasive, is that his utterance should be read uncharitably because he was defending a racist position to begin with.
Conservatives treated the response to Lowry as one of the greatest injustices on modern times. Lowry wrote an indignant defense, National Review announced a “Rich Lowry Cancellation Tour,” and kept up a series of posts raising money off their colleagues martyrdom.
The conservative position now seems to be that 56-year-old professional pundit Rich Lowry might mangle his words and say something he didn’t exactly mean, but 81-year-old self-described gaffe machine Joe Biden would never.
What makes this controversy especially rich is that Republicans have been insisting on interpreting their words in the most generous possible light. Donald Trump, in particular, offers up a constant stream of threats, criminal confessions, racist invective mixed in a with a dose of ambiguous rambling or gaffes that his supporters piously insist be understood in context. And it is true that some of Trump’s statement are actually not as bad as they sound of of context, while many others truly are.
The Republican defense impulse is so deeply ingrained that they have taken to making the blanket claim that people are just too sensitive overall. (A blanket “stop being offended” defense was all J.D. Vance could use, given the indisputably offensive text he was working with.) This was in fact the party’s chief message of the day through yesterday. Americans should “stop getting so offended,” Vance claimed. “I’m just — I’m so over it.”
Vance is over being over it. He is now wounded, hurt and deeply offended by what he claims Biden intended by his ambiguous statement:
The poor, poor snowflake cannot bear the anguish of being exposed to words that could be heard to mean his party’s supporters are garbage, even if we have no reason to believe that is what those words actually were.
Look, Biden has always been gaffe prone, and he’s gotten even more prone to garbling his words. There’s no reason he should be opining on the campaign other than his apparently unsuppressable ego. But the Republican campaign to uncharitably interpret his comment and then go into offense-taking mode should not be seen as anything other than pure hypocritical bad faith.
