Kamala Harris’s flagging presidential campaign seized onto a last glimmer of hope on Sunday, when the insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe made disparaging remarks about Puerto Rico while headlining Donald J. Trump’s rally in New York City’s iconic Madison Square Garden. Hinchcliffe, whose comments were immediately disavowed by the Trump campaign, and whom Trump has claimed not to know, called the U.S. territory a “floating island of garbage.”

To anyone who knows Puerto Rico’s abundant natural beauty and vibrant culture, Hinchcliffe’s tasteless joke was unfunny because it was both untrue and needlessly unkind. But rather than allow it to pass as a poor attempt at humor, the left wasted no time seizing on the joke to indict Trump yet again as a racist in a transparent attempt to peel Latino voters away from his campaign just over a week before the election. In just 72 hours after the rally, The New York Times—which has endorsed Harris, called Trump “unfit to lead,” printed op-eds opposing free speech, and recently cautioned its readers against excessive teasing—published at least 15 articles about the incident.

The Washington Post took time away from its internal meltdown over owner Jeff Bezos’s refusal to endorse Harris to luxuriate in the drama. Columnist Ruth Marcus listed Hinchcliffe’s joke first in a litany of rally features she designated “a diseased idea of America.” Politico, citing a Democratic source, claimed the joke was “spreading like wildfire” in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state. MSNBC topped the demonization scale by broadcasting clips of Trump’s rally interspersed with footage of a pro-Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden in 1939. Harris herself posted a video with Spanish subtitles claiming she has “always fought for the people of Puerto Rico” and promising to “invest in Puerto Rico’s future so that Puerto Ricans can not [sic] just get by, but get ahead.” Trump, she falsely claimed “abandoned and insulted them.”

Lest you think the Democrats have a monopoly on civility, Joe Biden, who mysteriously remains in office despite acknowledging that he could not conduct his reelection campaign, took to the airwaves Tuesday evening, as Harris addressed a large crowd on Washington’s Ellipse during which she called Trump a “petty tyrant,” in response to Hinchcliffe’s comment. Associating it directly with Trump, Biden opined to Voto Latino that “the only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump’s] supporters.” Leftist outlets immediately attempted to parse Biden’s comment, but before the evening was out, it simply became too newsworthy to downplay or ignore. Within hours, Biden and his press team were hard put to “clarify” his comments, claiming they were directed at Trump’s “rhetoric” rather than at the tens of millions of Americans who support him. Anyone who watches the viral video of Biden’s comments, however, will have difficulty ignoring their lying eyes and ears to believe a malicious, partisan-crazed octogenarian whose anointed successor is on the national ballot in less than a week.

Biden has previously described Trump’s supporters as people who “threaten our very democracy,” while the commentariat has routinely called Trump and his supporters “fascists” and “Nazis.” In a revealing double standard just one day after Trump’s rally, CNN banned conservative commentator Ryan Girdusky from future appearances because he jokingly connected last month’s attack on Hezbollah’s pagers to radical leftist journalist Mehdi Hasan after Hasan characterized Republicans as Nazis.

Trump learned of Biden’s comment in real time while addressing a Tuesday evening rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, when Florida Senator Marco Rubio approached the podium and read Biden’s remarks as “breaking news.” The Republican nominee immediately recalled failed 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s remark that half of Trump’s supporters were “deplorables” and “irredeemable.” “Garbage, I think, is worse,” Trump wryly continued, suggesting that Biden might be forgiven because the current president, in his widely attested mental incapacity, “knoweth not what he says.”

Hinchcliffe’s bad joke—a quip by a comedian whom Trump’s campaign immediately disavowed—pales in comparison to the commander-in-chief’s brazenly deriding tens of millions of Americans, including millions of Latinos and many Puerto Ricans among them, as refuse. Indeed, Biden’s comment even exceeds Clinton’s “deplorables” remark, for which she expressed regret, and which applied to only “half” of Trump’s supporters. It may have cost her critical support in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign despite significantly better polling data than Harris now enjoys. In the war of abusive campaign rhetoric, the Democrats are well ahead. In fact, it may be hard to recall anything uglier that has been said in American presidential politics by a leader of one of our national parties.