Trump fans wear garbage worker vests, garbage bags to Arizona rally

Before this week, Marty Sehl’s favorite Donald Trump ploy during the presidential election was working the drive-thru of a McDonald’s.

Then President Joe Biden had a misstep, calling Trump supporters “garbage” to fire back at a similar comment a comedian made about Puerto Rico during a Trump rally last weekend. The White House has since clarified that the statement was a reference to the comedian's rhetoric, not Trump's supporters.

That didn’t stop the former president from leaning into the gaffe by donning a garbage worker vest and climbing into a garbage truck to speak with the media at a campaign event earlier this week.

It was a “sweet” move, Sehl said. Knowing he’d be attending Trump’s rally in Glendale on Thursday, he decided to find vests for himself and his friends.

At least 20 vests were visible inside Desert Diamond Arena at 5:15 p.m. Other attendees donned garbage bags as clothing.

“I wasn't the only one who thought about it,” Sehl said with a laugh as he spotted others also wearing vests or trash bags. “Pretty cool.”

Just days before the Nov. 5 general election, at a time when both campaigns are fighting for voters’ attention, Biden’s remark has given the Trump campaign fodder to portray Biden and the Democrats as divisive or disdainful of Trump’s base of supporters.

Nicole Shanahan, who was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s running mate before he ended his independent presidential bid, referenced the remark at Trump’s Thursday evening rally in Glendale. She compared it to then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s 2016 remark that half of Trump's supporters belong in a "basket of deplorables.”

“Nobody in this room, or in this country, is deplorable. Nobody is garbage in this room,” Shanahan said to thunderous applause. “And it is wrong for a president of the United States to divide this country as he has.”

Biden’s gaffe has mitigated the fallout from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke, told at a Trump rally earlier this week, that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage.” It was part of a longer set of crude and disparaging jokes that Hinchcliffe told that also mocked Latinos, Black voters, and the conflict in the Middle East.

The Puerto Rico comment drew pushback from several Republican lawmakers and Democrats. A Trump campaign spokesperson said the joke “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

Trump often uses disparaging or inflammatory language to refer to his own political opponents. He has taken to referring to Democratic leaders as “scum” and “the enemy from within,” saying he would be open to using the National Guard or the military if “radical left lunatics” pose a problem on Election Day.

Sehl said he was struck by Biden’s comment because “he basically told 50% of the people ‘you're trash because you don't support me.’ That's a problem in a democracy.”

Asked whether he was offended by Hinchcliffe’s joke, Sehl said that wasn’t appropriate either.

“But two wrongs don't make a right,” he said. “And one's my president, the other one's the comedian. Big difference.”

“We're garbage people, I guess,” said Lori DiGiambatista, another rally attendee who wore a garbage worker vest with her husband, Tom DiGiambatista. “You’ll see a lot of them.”

Michael McBride and Kristie McBride, of Surprise, wore black garbage bags over their clothes with the words “MAGA GARBAGE” in red letters. The back of Kristie McBride’s garbage bag read “KISS MY TRASH.”

“Obviously there was a person in the White House that called us garbage. I think that's what he called us. So here we are,” Michael McBride said.