WASHINGTON - Both President Trump and his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, said things this week they probably wish they hadn’t.
Trump falsely claimed that Biden is “against God,” while Biden made a mistake by saying the African American community isn’t as diverse as the Latino community.
Political gaffes are nothing new. For as long as a politician has spoken in public, there’s a gaffe for that.
In 2012, Republican Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney had some infamous words during a debate against Barack Obama: “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ and they brought back whole binders full of women.”
Hillary Clinton made her mark in the 2016 campaign cycle, saying, “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”
“Typically, when we talk about a gaffe, we say it’s, when you say something silly, when you make an obvious mistake,” explained Professor Peter Loge, GWU Director of the Project On Ethics In Political Communication.
This week at a virtual convention for Black and Latino Journalists, Biden, the presumed Democratic nominee, said, “What you all know but most people don't know, unlike the African American community with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things. You go to Florida, you'll find a very different attitude about immigration in certain places than you do when you're in Arizona. So it's a very different, a very diverse community.”
The Biden campaign later walked the remarks back in a tweet — but not before Trump pounced: “Joe Biden this morning totally disparaged and insulted the Black community.”
President Trump has a long history with verbal misfires — from the harmless, such as when he mispronounced ‘Thailand’ as “thigh-land” — to the harmful, in which he falsely told a crowd that Biden would ‘“hurt the Bible, hurt God. He's against God, he's against guns."
“None of [Trump’s] supporters are surprised he says things that are a little beyond the pale,” said Loge. “Or mispronounces ‘Yosemite’ or he gets some basic stuff wrong. They say, ‘See? He’s being honest. See? He’s speaking from the heart.’ Biden’s supporters say, ‘This is just who Joe Biden is, he’s really a smart guy.’”
This election soundscape is one for the books. And with less than 90 days to go before the election, Loge believes more moments are inevitable:
“We’ve got a ballot with two, maybe three or four people on it, we have to choose among them, and there isn’t an option for ‘None of the above, I would like William Shakespeare.’”
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Main story image: AP
