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In October 2020, with just four weeks to go until Election Day, the reelection campaign of U.S. President Donald Trump posted a short video clip on Twitter saying it showed Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden calling Trump supporters the dregs of society. The tweet, posted on Oct. 6 by @TrumpWarRoom, contained the following text: Joe Biden called Trump supporters the 'dregs of society.' The idea that Biden is a unifier is a joke. In the accompanying eight-second clip, Biden says: They're a small percentage of the American people. Virulent people. Some of them the dregs of society. However, the Trump campaign's presentation of Biden's remarks was deeply misleading. Viewed in proper context, it's clear that the former U.S. vice president was not referring to Trump supporters as a whole, but rather what he called the forces of intolerance throughout the world and in the United States, in particular the Ku Klux Klan and the alt-right. In the 2016 election, the Trump campaign capitalized on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's infamous claim that half of Trump's supporters constituted a basket of deplorables. The false attack on Biden — both in September 2018, when he made the remarks, and again in 2020 — appeared to be an attempt to create a similar narrative around Biden, who has pitched himself to voters as a moderate and unifying candidate. The short clip posted by the Trump campaign was taken from a much longer speech that Biden gave on Sept. 15, 2018, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Biden was speaking at an annual dinner for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ rights non-profit. In order to provide the full context for Biden's dregs of society remark, the following is a transcript of the relevant section of his speech, and the moments leading up to it, with especially relevant remarks highlighted in bold. The section of the speech in question can be watched in full below: It's clear that when Biden said some of them [are] the dregs of society, he was referring to the forces of intolerance he had already discussed in his speech, namely the Trump administration and its most ardent right-wing supporters, which Biden specified as including the Ku Klux Klan and the alt-right. He did not call Trump supporters, in general, the dregs of society. The clip was framed in this misleading way shortly after the speech, in September 2018. Right-wing conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson tweeted it out, adding this goes way beyond 'deplorables,' and the president's son, Donald Trump Jr. promoted Watson's tweet, adding, We are all used to Creepy Joe saying stupid stuff but this is too far even for him. The false claim that Biden had described Trump's supporters as the dregs of society was given added credibility when Newsweek published an article, based on Trump Jr.'s tweet, with the erroneous headline, Donald Trump Jr. Says Joe Biden Went Too Far in Calling Trump Voters 'Dregs of Society.' Twitter has rules against what it labels synthetic and manipulated media, and its policies warn that we may label tweets containing synthetic and manipulated media to help people understand their authenticity and to provide additional context. The company has implemented that policy against Trump in the past. In March 2020, for example, Trump retweeted a video clip posted by his aide, Dan Scavino, which falsely presented Biden as endorsing Trump’s reelection. Scavino’s tweet, and Trump’s promotion of it, were both given the label manipulated media by Twitter. Twitter's policy categorizes isolative editing, omission of context, or presentation with false context (all three of which are features of @TrumpWarRoom's misleading October 2020 tweet), as subtler forms of manipulated media. Nonetheless, the company stipulates that such content may be labeled or removed on a case-by-case basis. Snopes asked Twitter whether the @TrumpWarRoom dregs tweet violated the company's rules against manipulated media, and whether they intended to take any action against the tweet or the @TrumpWarRoom account. We did not receive a response in time for publication, but we will update this fact check if we do.
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