MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Biden simply uncovered Kamala’s soiled secret. Now it is time to take out the true ‘rubbish’, America

Talk about an enemy from within!

As Kamala Harris delivered her closing argument on Tuesday night — in the shadow of the White House, site of Trump’s January 6 speech, to make her case as a uniter – Joe Biden tossed a verbal grenade into the heart of her campaign, calling Trump supporters ‘garbage’.

The damage is inestimable.

It’s Hillary Clinton‘s ‘deplorables’ moment all over again, proof that the Democrats have learned nothing since 2016, really don’t care to, and have never stopped believing that Trump voters are mouth-breathing racist, fascist, sexist xenophobes.

The only question: Does Biden know what he’s doing?

Seems increasingly so to me. Just as it seems Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, two of the shrewdest political strategists of the modern age, have made harmful remarks while stumping for Kamala.

Would it be surprising if the Dem establishment has, at best, conflicting feelings about a future President Cackles?

Speaking to Latino voters in a Zoom interview, President Biden leapt on those remarks made by an insult comic at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, calling Puerto Rico ‘a floating island of garbage’.

Now: Was that a clumsy reference to Puerto Rico’s decades-long environmental crisis, caused by overflowing trash endangering water, air, soil and wildlife?

Perhaps. But it did not land that way. That joke — defended, notably, by no less a progressive icon than Jon Stewart — was too easily read as racist. It was a terrible, unforced error. Trump’s campaign swiftly disavowed it.

But here was helpful Old Joe on Tuesday night, speaking from the White House as Harris was trying to appear presidential.

‘Just the other day,’ Biden said, ‘a speaker at [Trump’s] rally called Puerto Rico ‘a floating island of garbage’. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters’.

It was the quiet part said out loud, again.

The mask slips and slips and can’t be properly affixed. Conservatives don’t express this kind of hate for liberals. Confusion, yes. Skepticism, yes. Sure — Trump attacks Democratic elites, the lunatic left, and says plenty of wild stuff — but you don’t hear him calling Harris supporters ‘garbage’ or ‘deplorables’.

Yet the Dems — and their compatriots in the left-leaning media — continue to glorify themselves as the party of kindness, unity and tolerance when they are anything but.

In their eyes, anyone who questions trans orthodoxy is an irredeemable bigot. Anyone not pro-Palestine is a genocidal warmonger. If you question unfettered late-term abortions, you want to strip women of all their rights. If you want a controlled border, you’re racist.

And if you’re voting for Trump, you’re trash.

Never let it be said that the Dems don’t know how to get people to the voting booth.

On Wednesday morning, Harris attempted to clean up this mess, speaking — conveniently muffled by the engines of Air Force Two — to a press gaggle at Joint Base Andrews.

Has she spoken to President Biden since his remarks?

‘He did call me last night,’ she said, ‘but this didn’t come up.’

Is she kidding? Her own ‘October Surprise’ didn’t come up?

Just when you think Harris can’t get any more inauthentic, she outdoes herself. It’s truly the only thing she’s any good at.

Why not express anger, disgust, emotion? Why not make a true-faith effort to speak to undecideds who are, doubtless, now leaning toward Trump?

Then again, this a woman who continually praises ‘Dougie’, the troublesome husband who allegedly slapped an ex-girlfriend and impregnated the nanny. Perhaps Kamala Harris is well-versed in excusing bad behaviors — damaging, catastrophic behaviors — by the men in her life.

Asked whether Trump voters would find Biden’s remarks insulting, Harris said, ‘I am running for president of the United States’ — we know — ‘talking with the American people… to lift them up around their aspirations, their ambitions and their dreams.’

This again? Unreal.

How is it that none of her speechwriters, none of those ex-Obama geniuses, we able to craft her a pithy rejoinder?

Whether she’s animated by fear, ineptitude or laziness, Harris keeps ratifying one truth: she’s not up to the job.

Perhaps this is why Bill Clinton, who surely knows better, admitted — while stumping for Kamala! — that Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student murdered by an illegal immigrant, would likely still be alive if the Biden-Harris administration had ‘properly vetted’ the 10-million-plus migrants (probably more) who have crossed the border in the past four years.

Or why Barack Obama hectored black male voters who, in his estimation, ‘aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president’.

In the wake of Biden’s trash-talk, the White House scrambled. First, they issued a transcript that changed the word ‘supporters’ to ‘supporter’s’ — an unethical altering of a sitting president’s remarks.

Aides then furiously contacted newsrooms, the Mail included, ‘checking’ that editors had the official White House statement.

And, of course, left-leaning outlets swiftly fell in line. Here’s the lead from the New York Times report, updated at 1.20 am on Wednesday:

‘Donald J. Trump and his allies are trying to recreate a moment that resonated deeply with his supporters in the 2016 campaign: when Hillary Clinton referred to Trump supporters as a ‘basket of deplorables’.’

So you see: Biden’s remarks are Trump’s fault!

This is why Harris can’t break 50 percent in the polls. This is why legacy media is dying.

When you tell people that what they have seen and heard is, in fact, not what they have seen and heard, you’ve lost. When you tell people that they are too stupid to trust their own sensory inputs — same.

And when your outgoing president is still embittered by his expulsion — when, per Axios this weekend, his offers to help the Harris campaign are routinely rebuffed — well, you might just find yourself agreeing with your opponent: There is, indeed, an enemy within.

And his name is Joe Biden.