Hillary
Clinton regrets 'basket of deplorables' remark as Trump attacks
Democrat doubles down on
‘prejudice and paranoia’ of Trump campaignry Clinton has
expressed regret over her controversial statement that half of Donald
Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables”.
Clinton
made the remark when speaking at a gala event for the group LGBT for
Hillary in New York City on Friday night, saying: “You know, to
just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s
supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
Ben Jacobs in
Washington
@Bencjacobs
Sunday 11 September
2016 08.49 BST
“The racist,
sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it. And
unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.
“Some of those
folks,” she added, “they are irredeemable.”
In a statement
released on Saturday afternoon, the Democratic presidential nominee
repeated that she had been being “grossly generalistic” but
expressed regret for “saying ‘half’”, adding: “That was
wrong.”
However, she
followed with longstanding lines of attack on Trump, saying the
Republican nominee had “built his campaign largely on prejudice and
paranoia and given a national platform to hateful views and voices”.
She also said: “Many
of Trump’s supporters are hard-working Americans who just don’t
feel like the economy or our political system are working for them.”
Republicans had
pounced on her remarks. In a Saturday speech to the Values Voters
Summit of social conservative activists in Washington DC, which Trump
addressed on Friday, Mike Pence condemned Clinton.
The Republican
vice-presidential nominee said: “The men and women who support
Donald Trump’s campaign are hardworking Americans … Hillary, they
are not a basket of anything. They are Americans, and they deserve
your respect.”
The chairman of the
Republican National Committee (RNC), Reince Priebus, echoed Pence in
a statement, saying: “The truly deplorable thing in this race is
the shameful level of condescension and disrespect Hillary Clinton is
showing to her fellow citizens.”
Trump, per his
habit, initiallyresponded on Twitter. He wrote: “While Hillary said
horrible things about my supporters, and while many of her supporters
will never vote for me, I still respect them all!”
Subsequently, in a
statement, the Republican nominee called Clinton’s remarks “the
worst mistake of the political season” and accused her of “showing
bigotry and hatred for millions of Americans”.
Trump added: “How
can she be president of our country when she has such contempt and
disdain for so many great Americans? Hillary Clinton should be
ashamed of herself, and this proves beyond a doubt that she is unfit
and incapable to serve as president of the United States.”
In an RNC conference
call for reporters on Saturday afternoon, congresswoman Marsha
Blackburn and pastor Darrell Scott, a long-time Trump supporter,
insisted that Clinton’s comment displayed her “elitism”. They
went on to characterize the remarks, which were open to pooled press,
as having been made in private and somehow overheard.
Clinton has long
targeted Trump’s ties to the so-called “alt-right”, a fringe
internet-based movement with links to white nationalist thought,
particularly after Steve Bannon, head of the Breitbart.com news site,
became CEO of the Trump campaign in August.
In a speech that
month in Reno, Nevada, Clinton said Trump and his supporters were the
vanguard of a “paranoid fringe” which had taken control of the
Republican party and insisted: “This is not conservatism as we have
known it.”
In her statement on
Saturday, she said: “What’s really ‘deplorable’ is that
Donald Trump hired a major advocate for the so-called ‘alt-right’
movement to run his campaign and that [former Ku Klux Klan grand
wizard] David Duke and other white supremacists see him as a champion
of their values.
“It’s deplorable
that Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia
and given a national platform to hateful views and voices, including
by retweeting fringe bigots with a few dozen followers and spreading
their message to 11 million people.”
Trump first came to
political prominence in 2011, falsely claiming that President Obama
was born in Kenya. He has made a number of racially charged remarks
throughout his campaign, which he launched in June 2015 by saying
Mexico was deliberately sending rapists to the US.
On Twitter on
Saturday, the longtime Trump confidante and former Nixon operative
Roger Stone embraced the “deplorables” phrase, sharing a meme
that grouped supporters of the Republican nominee, including the
InfoWars.com host Alex Jones, in a takeoff of the action movie The
Expendables.
.webp)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário