Harris backers sound off on Biden calling Trump supporters ‘garbage’

When asked what she thinks of Trump supporters, Holly Meyer, of Madison, Wisconsin, chuckled.

“I’m a lady,” the 65-year-old said with a laugh, while waiting for Harris at a rally in Madison. “I’m baffled by how they can support someone like him.”

Meyer said she knows some Trump supporters and “they probably say the same thing about me.”

“They don’t want to listen,” she said.

Meyer said for her sanity, she mostly tries not to engage. She said Trump used the term “garbage” first and Biden “was just throwing it back at him.”

Jeanne Cargill, 61, a retired worker for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources who lives in Madison, said it was a “slip” for
Biden to describe Trump backers as garbage.

“The other side throwing it back and making a big deal is so hypocritical considering what has been coming out of their side for ages,” she said while attending a Harris rally. “It seems to me there’s been a lot less bile and attacking individual people coming from the Harris side,” Cargill said.

Phil and Debi Franz drove from Naperville, Illinois, to attend the Harris rally in Wisconsin. They both said that conversations with Trump supporters don’t go well.

“Everything we say they have a ridiculous answer for,” Debi Franz, a 66-year-old retired nurse said, “It’s terrible to say because we don’t have a lot of conversations any more. It’s fruitless.”

“I just avoid it,” Phil Franz, a 68-year-old retired consultant said. Still, Debi Franz said it was wrong for Biden to call Trump supporters garbage.

“I don’t like that,” she said. “But he did apologize.”

“Something Donald Trump doesn’t do,” her husband added. Neither of them thought the remark would have a measurable impact on the election.

“People that are going to vote for Trump have already decided,” Phil Franz said. Ginseng farmer Nick Sandquist, from Wausau, Wisconsin, said he tries to have conversations with Trump supporters, including his brother and father, but “it doesn’t go very well.”

He said Trump was being a hypocrite for criticizing Biden over the garbage comment.

“It’s ironic for Donald Trump to use name calling for his advantage,” Sandquist, 47, said. “We’re not the type you have to worry about storming the Capitol.”