No, Biden did not call Trump supporters garbage.
No, Biden did not call Trump supporters garbage.
Gambling with existential fears.
No, Biden did not call Trump supporters garbage. None of them! But strong psychological dynamics may make us want to believe he did.
Biden was clearly referring to not-so-funny Comedian Hinchcliffe’s comment calling Puerto Rico an island of garbage. Biden said: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his [Trump’s] supporter’s — his [Hinchcliffe’s] — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.” The word “supporter’s” clearly referred to the one person who made the dehumanizing comment: Hinchcliffe. That Biden was speaking of a single Trump supporter is confirmed by his use of the singular “his” in “his" demonization of Latinos.” What psychological dynamics are at play so that the false narrative has gotten so much traction?
In a time when existential fears are ramped up in the US election, there is a tremendous difference between labeling the action of one Trump supporter’s comment as garbage and labeling the entire existence of all Trump supporters as garbage.
Of course, for political firepower, Trump and the Trump campaign try in the final stretch before the election to distract from Hinchcliffe’s comments about all of Puerto Rico being garbage by falsely claiming that Biden did the same to all Trump supporters. It is Trump who actually called “people that surround” Harris “scum” and “absolute garbage” and used the same epithets for the Vice President and others. Now he is deflecting from this and from his supporter Hinchcliffe’s comment at his grand Madison Square Garden event by projecting the outrage directed at himself onto Biden.
The Trump campaign’s strategy of gambling with existential-social fears is clear: to get more followers outraged based on another lie so that they would come out to vote in protest against Harris, who gets simply lumped in with Biden. It is a dishonest attempt to turn this into what it is not: the Hillary Clinton moment in 2016 when she called Trump’s followers a “basket of deplorables.”
That much of the media on both sides of the political spectrum quickly reported the false version without the apostrophe points to a powerful unconscious dynamic at play that psychology calls “projective identification.”
Let me explain: Projective identification would mean that the dehumanizing that Hinchcliffe did with his garbage comment is projected by the Trump campaign (and then by those who uncritically believe and report it) onto Biden as he criticized Hinchcliffe’s comment. As Biden used the same word, ‘garbage,’ for Hinchcliffe’s comment, Biden, in a way, identified with part of what Hinchcliffe did. While Biden used ‘garbage’ to criticize a comment of one person and not an entire group, this is what gets lost in projective identification. Hinchcliffe had dehumanized an entire group. And that is now projected onto Biden in a reversal: he supposedly also dehumanized an even bigger group. Of course, Biden’s halting delivery did not help.
Since a projective identification dynamic is usually based on strong affects, clear thinking quickly goes out the window, which makes it such a useful tool for politicians. A funny clip from the movie Anger Management with Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson gives a great example of how the reversal works in projective identification. In the case of Biden’s comment, the difference between what Biden said and what Hinchcliffe said is quickly (and often unconsciously) ignored or intentionally distorted in social discourse.
If the Trump campaign succeeds, it will get people to continue to believe the distorted projection onto Biden: that Biden would really have said all Trump supporters are garbage. That could potentially shift the election, which is clearly what the Trump campaign is hoping for by making the false projection as memorable as possible, with Trump in a garbage truck and all.
But Trump, of course, can’t help himself making new incendiary comments that quickly shift the focus back onto him, such as saying “whether women like it or not, I’m going to protect them” or envisioning at a campaign event to put former Rep. Liz Cheney “with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it.”
If projective identification is to blame for the false narrative, understanding what actually happened can correct it. The Washington Post, for instance, provided a thoughtful analysis that could help understand how and why people could have heard or misheard Biden’s comments.
Tied in with the projective identification dynamic, another reason for the widespread reporting of the false narrative comes into play: the mere thought of the projection that Biden could possibly have called half the electorate garbage can artificially hype up fear and anger in a large portion of the country. This social-existential fear can not only be infectious, it also sells. The false reporting thus may have unconsciously or, in some cases, not so unconsciously been motivated by getting income-generating eyeballs and clicks on an existentially fearful story - incidentally just in time for Halloween.
The media can play a part in reducing the climate of paranoia and division in the country by doing more diligence in thinking psychologically about the effects of reporting when projective identification is going on. Not to do so would be a reckless gamble with existential and social anxieties when the fate of the most powerful and, perhaps, most divided nation on the planet is at stake.
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