OPINION:
It’s the greatest closing campaign pitch of all time. Donald Trump: America’s Garbageman.
From the beginning, his supporters have looked to him, not for his reverential political demeanor or the fresh scent of his dainty rhetoric. They are not looking for a guy to date their daughter, and they do not want someone with the quiet casket-side manner of a funeral director.
They want someone to take out the garbage.
They are looking for a man they can send to Washington to wade through all the piles of nasty, fetid trash, wave away the giant, bumbling flies and haul it all away — how and to where they do not care.
So here he comes, dressed in a blaze orange garbageman’s vest with reflective tape down the chest, ready for dirty service. And with a friendly smile.
And best of all? Mr. Trump held a press conference while hanging out the passenger side window of his gleaming white garbage truck emblazoned with his campaign insignia.
For nine years, Mr. Trump has ridiculed, tortured, enflamed and insulted the American political press. Deservedly so. Now, he has relegated them to shouting questions over the rumble of a diesel engine while he hangs a beefy elbow out the window.
“How do you like my garbage truck?” he shouts down to the curious quislings on the pavement in the voice of a mob boss who just took control of the city’s sanitation department. “This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden.”
Don. Don from Queens.
Don. The king of trash talk.
The Orange Monster.
What is really funny about it is the elegance of it all.
All the trash talk began with a stupid joke from an insult comic in the wee hours of Mr. Trump’s epic (and long) rally Sunday evening at Madison Square Garden. Something about garbage and Puerto Rico — which, to be fair, has a notorious garbage problem, being an island and all.
Anyway, desperate to prove their hysterical claims that Mr. Trump is a racist Nazi, the Democratic media pounced on the joke and went full tilt with wall-to-wall coverage about it — insisting that Puerto Rican voters would be so offended by a comedian they had never heard of that they would punish Mr. Trump for the joke. And then President Biden weighed in.
In cartoon terms, they lit the fuse but forgot to throw the bomb.
The sitting president — the leader of the free world that Vice President Kamala Harris and all the Democratic media have been assuring us for years is of perfectly sound mind — decided to riff off the Puerto Rico joke himself by insulting half the American population.
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Mr. Biden said in a sad webinar from the White House.
Extra funny about all this is that the reason Mr. Biden — the actual winner of the 2024 Democratic primaries — was doing a sad Zoom call from the White House in the first place is that his vice president refuses to allow him to campaign with her, even when she is holding a campaign rally just outside the White House on the Ellipse.
So there she was, ranting about Donald Trump with the White House glowing behind her. Inside was Mr. Biden, stewing and steaming and cast aside like garbage.
On the livestream from the Oval Office — or maybe the fake Oval Office set up for him — Mr. Biden leans forward too close to the camera. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”
The White House doctored the transcript. Something about a lost apostrophe. Something plural that was supposed to be singular. Whatever. President Biden — the man who gave us Vice President Kamala Harris — called half the country “garbage” less than a week before Election Day.
Mr. Trump pounced and seized and heaved himself up into a garbage truck. And then held a press conference out the window. And after that a rally, still wearing the orange vest that campaign staffers said made him look thinner. And then another rally.
Mr. Biden’s “garbage” remark reminded him of Hillary Clinton’s fateful comment in 2016 calling Trump supporters “deplorable” and “irredeemable.”
“‘Garbage’ I think is worse, right?” Mr. Trump asked the crowd of supporters at his next rally.
“But he doesn’t know,” Mr. Trump added, extending sympathy to the addled Mr. Biden. “You have to please forgive him.”
Then, a twinkle in Mr. Trump’s eye. The moment turned biblical. And Mr. Trump offered a prayer for Mr. Biden, a lost and lonely prisoner in his own White House.
“Please forgive him,” Mr. Trump said gallantly to the Lord, “for he not knoweth what he said.”
The crowd roared with laughter, hooted and cheered.
The trashman cometh, indeed.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.