He donned a neon orange trash collector's vest and traded in his Cadillac Escalade for a garbage truck as he fired up his base by responding to a comment President Joe Biden made comparing them to "garbage."
After the rally with the garbage truck in Milwaukee, the former president wore his trash collector vest again at a rally there.
He said it showed what Biden and Democrats thought of them, that they were "garbage."
The sartorial style was also a symbolic appeal to the working class, a significant part of his base.
Earlier this month, he had put on an apron and fried chips at a McDonald's restaurant and served at its take-out counter.
In his part of trash-talking that was initiated by a cruel comedian joke at one Trump rally claiming Puerto Rico as an "island of floating garbage, " Biden referred to supporters of the rival incumbent as "garbage."
"The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and un-American.".
That echoes Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race against Trump when she referred to his supporters as "deplorables," turning off some segments of the working class against the Democratic Party, which they consider elitist.
Democrats rushed into damage control mode to douse its fallout.
Vice President under Biden running against Trump in next week's election said, accusing her boss of being amongst them, "Let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for."
Other democrats piled on, a post on X by Representative Jared Golden saying, "Any elected official or candidate who calls Americans or America 'garbage' is flat out wrong."
Biden's remark on Monday eclipsed the huge rally Harris staged on the Ellipse in Washington during the event.
Biden took the unprecedented walking-back comment, tweeting on X: "Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump's supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage - which is the only word I can think of to describe it."
His demonisation of Latinos is unconscionable, he added. That is all I meant to say. Those comments at the rally don't reflect who we are as a nation.
A missing apostrophe made a difference for a White House that said otherwise.
It should have been put in the word "supporters," so it is referring to the words in the joke and not to the supporters, his team said.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, in a series of offensive jokes against different minorities, had said, "I don't know if you know this but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it's called Puerto Rico."
Then, he disowned him and said, "I do not know him; somebody put him there. I do not know who he is."
The Latino Republican Senator Marco Rubio said on X that "those weren't Trump's words."
" Puertorico isn't trash; it is the home to fellow American citizens who have done tremendous contributions to our country, he wrote.
The Democrats amplified Hinchcliffe's slur against Puerto Ricans and Latinos to chip away at Trump's advance among that population – the president now leads his opponent 39 percent to 27 percent among Latinos, NBC polls indicate.
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