‘Clutch your pearls’: TikTok personality mocks Donald Trump’s supporters after Joe Biden calls them ‘garbage’
A TikTok star with hundreds of thousands of supporters has lost patience with her fellow Americans, it seems.
TikTok. I, a 34-year-old man, do not understand it, so what chance do 60-year-old Kamala Harris and 78-year-old Donald Trump have? Yet it’s playing an increasingly important role in western politics, and therefore US politics.
The person whose video I’m about to mention, Stella Magz, has 780,000 followers on TikTok and 85,000 subscribers on YouTube. You’ve probably never heard of her, and those figures are far from record-setting, but they mean she has about a third of the The Washington Post’s total subscriber base.
Not the fairest comparison, I’ll grant you, given TikTok is free and subscribing to The Post isn’t, but the point here is merely that Stella has a significant audience.
Most of her content is focused on politics, and there is very little doubt which way she leans.
Her YouTube channel’s tag line is “when they go low, I go lower”, a reference to Michelle Obama’s famous “when they go low, we go high” quote from the 2016 election. And ... yeah, OK. Unconventional branding decision, there.
To be fair though, Americans have been stooping lower and lower in their politics for some years now. Last week, for example, President Joe Biden labelled supporters of Donald Trump “garbage”. That remark, and the outrage it caused, were the catalyst for Stella’s video.
She felt said outrage was hypocritical. And judging by the 700,000 or so views on her original TikTok video alone, plus hundreds of thousands more from other people sharing it, her view resonated with a decent chunk of Americans.
“I want you to sit with this feeling. I want you to sit with this feeling of being called ‘garbage’, one time, by a sitting president,” she said in the clip, addressing Mr Trump’s supporters.
“I want you to sit with this feeling, because maybe you will feel just a crumb, a crumb, of how millions and millions of people in this country have felt over the course of nine years, having to deal with Donald Trump.
“Trump’s supporters set the standard on how people should react when a politician says something bad. You guys set that standard. You set that standard when, for nine years, you allowed Donald Trump to say the most horrific things about marginalised groups.
“Calling Mexicans ‘rapists’ and ‘murderers’. Saying the LBTQIA community harms children. That Muslims are terrorists who should be banned from the country. That he couldn’t possibly have assaulted E. Jean Carroll because she wasn’t ‘his type’.”
(Mr Trump was found to have sexually assaulted Ms Carroll, a professional writer, in a civil trial – the judge described it as “rape” – and he has been ordered to pay her almost $US100 million in compensation.)
“He’s called people like me a ‘lunatic’ for nine years. A ‘liberal lunatic’,” Stella continued.
“Nine f***ing years. And not one of his supporters has ever, ever come out to call him out on it. They clapped for it, they cheered for it, they egged him on.
“So if you’re offended, this one time. You want to clutch your pearls, this one time. But you also fail to realise you guys set the standard over how I should react to it?
“Right? Let’s see. ‘Oh, you’re taking it out of context.’ ‘Oh it was just a joke.’ ‘Ohhhhh, Biden’s just off the cuff, right? You know how Biden is, he just says things. He’s funny. He tells it how it is.’
“Nine f***ing years. Sit with it. One time.”
‘I will not be voting for Joe Biden’
In a separate video, Stella started with her tongue firmly in cheek but progressed once again to expressing her irritation.
“Because of Joe Biden’s comments, I will not be voting for Joe Biden on election day,” she said, before flashing a sarcastic grin.
“Solidarity, my brothers and sisters! This man is out the door. You ever retire from a job and didn’t give a f*** anymore? That’s relatable.
“He said, ‘For four damn years you’ve been saying I’ve got dementia, I’m Sleepy Joe, f*** Joe Biden.’ And he came out and said, ‘You know what, f*** y’all too. I’m done, I’m out.’ And you all want to cry about it.
“Donald Trump has literally threatened to send the military against people like me, because I’m ‘the enemy within’. And (Joe Biden) called you guys ‘garbage’, and now you want to cry about it?
“Donald Trump has demonised every marginalised group in this country.
“Y’all cheer him on when he talks s*** about everybody else.”
During the 2016 campaign Mr Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, referred to some of his supporters as “deplorables”. The remark haunted her right up until election day.
Mr Biden’s “garbage” comment is in the same genre. He made it while speaking about a poorly received joke from one of Mr Trump’s recent rallies, in which stand-up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”.
Puerto Rico is an American territory home to about three million US citizens. Of more strategic importance is the significant Puerto Rican community in some of the swing states – in Pennsylvania, for example, there are about half a million Puerto Ricans.
“Donald Trump has no character. He doesn’t give a damn about the Latino community,” Mr Biden said during the offending event, a video call hosted by an organisation which seeks to drive up Latino turnout.
“Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage’.
“They’re good, decent, honourable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.
“His demonisation of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
The White House later tried to claim that Mr Biden meant “supporter’s”, not “supporters”, which would mean he was referring solely to Mr Hinchcliffe, not Mr Trump’s supporters in a broader sense. I’ll let you decide how plausible that explanation is.
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