Donald Trump rides garbage truck in Green Bay in bid to turn tables on Puerto Rico flap
ASHWAUBENON – Former President Donald Trump stepped off of his plane Wednesday and into the passenger seat of a garbage truck.
Before he took the stage here in the shadow of Lambeau Field, the former president sought to turn the tables on comments made at his rally in New York just days earlier disparaging Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
He seized on remarks from President Joe Biden on Tuesday in which Biden appeared to refer to Trump supporters as “garbage” in responding to the comments at the Trump rally. He took questions from the press while sitting in a garbage truck and wore a bright orange reflective vest as he spoke to a crowd of about 10,000 in the Resch Center.
“I have to start by saying 250 million Americans are not garbage,” Trump told the crowd. “My supporters are far higher quality than Crooked Joe and Lying Kamala.”
Trump in his wide-ranging remarks zeroed in on illegal immigration, attacking Harris for having “violated her oath” over the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border and repeated his unsupported claims that South American countries are “emptying their mental institutions” into the U.S. He said he planned to “talk to Mexico very early” on about the border and fentanyl if he’s elected.
The remarks served as part of Trump’s closing message in a state he’ll likely need to win in just six days to return to the White House. Polling shows a toss-up race in Wisconsin, and both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have focused on the swing state over the past several months.
At the same time and about 140 miles down the road, Harris rallied supporters in Madison alongside a cast of top musicians. Both candidates are set to return to Milwaukee on Friday.
During his 80-minute speech, Trump strayed in typical fashion from topic to topic, claiming at multiple points that wars in Ukraine and the Middle East would not have started under his watch, and he doubled down on his plan for sweeping tariffs on imports that could increase prices for consumers at the same time he pledged to “rapidly defeat inflation.”
“I will never apologize for defending America,” he said. “I will protect our workers, I will protect our jobs, I will protect our borders, I will protect families and I will protect the birthright of our children to live in the richest and most powerful nation on the face of the Earth.”
Trump, who has long advocated for in-person voting, praised Wisconsin Republicans for voting early — more than 1 million people across the state have voted absentee — and said that if “we win Wisconsin, we win the whole thing.”
He called for a “landslide victory that is too big to rig” — a reference to his repeated false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
But he also at times devolved into personal attacks on Harris. Early on in his remarks, Trump said Harris was not fit to be president and labeled Democrats a “savage machine.”
At one point, Trump played a video from Harris’ speech at the Ellipse on the National Mall on Tuesday that featured only Harris saying the words “Donald Trump.”
“That’s all she talked about because she and Joe only have failure and gloom and death,” he said, claiming without evidence that some of the about 75,000 attendees were paid to be there.
Democrats in a statement ahead of the rally panned Trump as “unhinged” and noted some Wisconsin Republicans have endorsed Harris in recent weeks. They said a second Trump term would “rip away our reproductive rights” and raise costs for middle-class families.
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“Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged, focused on himself and his own grievances instead of American families,” said Kristi Johnston, a Wisconsin spokesperson for the Harris campaign.
Before the rally, thousands of supporters lined the streets a block from Lambeau Field. Many wore red MAGA hats, and several had t-shirts featuring a photo of Trump with his fist in the air in the moments after the July 13 assassination attempt. One man wore a wig of Trump’s golden hair.
Many of the nearly two dozen attendees who spoke to the Journal Sentinel acknowledged the neck-and-neck race in battleground Wisconsin. But they pointed to the long line outside the Resch Center as evidence of support for the former president.
“I’m a little nervous,” said James Renner, who drove to the rally from Marquette, Michigan. “But over the last two elections — before this — it’s definitely changed how people are reacting to Trump, how much more people you see coming out for Trump.
“I’m confident Trump will win,” said Ken Sieglaff of De Pere. “He’s not scared. We need someone who’s got a backbone. He’s got it.”
But Republican attempts to change the line of attack on the remarks by a comedian at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday disparaging Puerto Ricans remained a consistent theme throughout the night.
While Biden has said he was referring “to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump's supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage,” nearly every speaker on Wednesday sought to use the remark to damage Democrats’ closing message in the waning days of the campaign.
Former Green Bay Packers legend Brett Favre pointed to the remark as he said he was returning to Green Bay because there’s “never been a more important time in our lives than right now.”
And Sen. Ron Johnson claimed Biden’s “political gaffe” showed what “he actually thinks of you.”
Still, a number of rally attendees largely dismissed it as insignificant.
“I consider it (like the) deplorable comment,” said Jamie Longsine of Green Bay, referencing a 2016 jab from Hillary Clinton. “It’s a badge of honor. I consider it a badge of honor. I don’t care what he thinks.”
(This story was updated to add photos or video.)
Alison Dirr of the Journal Sentinel contributed from Milwaukee.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Trump rides garbage truck to turn tables on Puerto Rico controversy