Page 80 of 107 Days

The night before, JOD had barely left the Ellipse after the rally when her phone rang. She was walking with her kids, making their way through the dispersing crowd. Instead of a minute to bask in the uplift of the evening, she learned that we were again about to go into crisis mode.

Ike and Kirsten, waiting for the crowd to thin, had found a table at a restaurant a few blocks from the White House.

They were celebrating a sweet moment from right after the speech.

In the front row of the audience, they’d spotted a woman they recognized from a TikTok post earlier that day.

She had bused from New York City and posted about being the first person in line for my rally.

Ike and Kirsten brought her backstage after the speech to meet me, and we’d both been delighted.

They were thinking their work was done for the night when their phones blew up:

Joe Biden.

Trump supporters.

Garbage.

Our campaign was going to have to clean it up.

Just as I had been stepping onto the stage at the Ellipse, Joe had been on a get-out-the-vote call to the group Voto Latino.

He was commenting on the Hinchcliffe “floating island of garbage” so-called joke at Trump’s rally three days earlier. Joe said, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s”—meaning the comedian’s hateful rhetoric.

But alas, on a Zoom call, no one can hear a possessive apostrophe.

What everyone heard was the president calling Trump’s supporters garbage. It was covered as Hillary’s “deplorables” on steroids. And this perception flew directly counter to the message of inclusion I had worked so hard to craft and communicate in my speech the night before.

Marco Rubio, informed about Biden’s call right after it happened, ran onstage and interrupted Trump at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to breathlessly relate the gaffe.

Rubio was there, no doubt, to shore up Hispanic support in Pennsylvania after Hinchcliffe’s appalling remarks at Trump’s rally.

The Trump campaign immediately sent out a fundraising email: “Moments ago, Kamala’s boss crooked Joe Biden just called ALL my supporters GARBAGE - HE WAS TALKING TO YOU!”

So, before I got on Air Force Two at the beginning of a long day on the trail in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, I gathered the press pool.

I told them that Joe had clarified what he meant to say.

And then I added: “You heard 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, and as president of the United States, I will be a president for all Americans, whether you vote for me or not.”

What had been a big problem for the Trump campaign had been turned, instead, into a mess for us.