Trash Talk On Election Eve: Vivek Ramaswamy Rides Garbage Truck at North Carolina Rally
- It's a follow up to President Joe Biden’s response to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s quip about Puerto Rico and Latinos at Trump’s Madison Square Garden event.
Donald Trump wasn’t the only politician who arrived at a campaign rally in a garbage truck. Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy boarded one as well. The Indian American biotech millionaire arrived at an Oct. 30 campaign event in Charlotte, North Carolina a T-shirt showing Oscar the Grouch in a trash bin and wearing a yellow vest. In a video shared on X, he was seen operating a garbage truck, greeting sanitation workers, and collecting trash on the streets. “We’re not the garbage,” he told the attendees. “It’s time to take out the real trash in America, and send Kamala Harris packing,” he said to a thunderous applause.
The same day, the GOP presidential nominee rode into a campaign rally in Wisconsin in a garbage truck. “How do you like my garbage truck? This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden,” Trump said from the passenger seat, which featured a Trump campaign sticker and flag.
Both acts were in response to President Joe Biden’s follow-up to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s opening statement about Puerto Rico and Latinos at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s,” Biden said. He chided Trump’s “demonization of Latinos” as “unconscionable and it’s un-American.”
Ramaswamy told the New York Post that the intention was to “use the disgusting and somewhat ugly and divisive comment” from Biden “to create a positive moment out of this.” But the idea of arriving on a garbage truck in North Carolina came to him independently of Trump riding in a “big beautiful” MAGA garbage truck,” he told the Post. “We were motivated by the same love of the people of this country. And so that’s just one of many instances where you’ll see multiple leaders in our movement arrive at similar concepts in real-time at the same time.”
At the rally, he told attendees that, unlike their opponents, they “don’t try to pretend like we’re something we’re not.” He said Trump arrived at his event on his private plane, and he arrived in his. “I think that we just do whatever we need to do to get the job done. And it’s not that we’re trying to — I think it’s one thing if you’re saying you’re trying to pretend to be something that you’re not.”
Ramaswamy also spoke to Leo, who drove the garbage truck, who told him that he felt “disrespected” by Biden’s “horrible” comment.
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