Hillary Clinton issued a statement that she “regrets” saying half of Donald Trump supporters are “deplorable” – but she stopped short of apologizing for her comment.
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Dropping in the polls and failing to perform up to expectations in her first major media test since the Democratic convention, Hillary Clinton tried a new approach to wooing support for her campaign for the presidency Friday by attacking, not Donald Trump, but rather his supporters. She said that Friday night at a fundraiser in NY.
“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of [Donald Trump’s] supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”. “Unfortunately there are people like that”.
“Just when Hillary Clinton said she was going to start running a positive campaign, she ripped off her mask and revealed her true contempt for everyday Americans”, he said.
Clinton also told the crowd at the “LGBT for Hillary” gala that other Trump supporters are people who feel let down by the government and the economy, and are “desperate for change”.
“They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different”, Ms Clinton said. “They say I have the most loyal people … where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
Clinton’s comment could help Trump, said Republican strategist Doug Heye.
Trump himself took to Twitter Saturday saying: “Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of fantastic, hard working people”.
He noted Saturday that “I was just seeing this morning there’s some press event in D.C. today by a white nationalist group that’s talking about how they’ve received a higher profile because of the Trump campaign”. “If he doesn’t respect all Americans, how can he serve all Americans?”
Apologising, Mrs Clinton said: “Last night I was “grossly generalistic” and that’s never a good idea”.
“She said, “Look, I’m generalizing here, but a lot of his support is coming from this odd place, that he’s given a platform to the alt-right and white nationalists, ‘” Kaine said in an interview with The Washington Post”. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now how 11 million.
Mr Trump, a NY businessman who has never run for political office before, regularly says things that some consider insulting, racist or off-colour.
But some Twitter users agreed with Clinton, referencing remarks by Trump that have been called racist, such as when he described some Mexican immigrants drug dealers and rapists.
Clinton then said some of these people were “irredeemable” and “not America”.
The Republican presidential nominee earned a standing ovation before and after his brief remarks.
Mrs Clinton has made similar comments in the past.
Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comments have drawn immediate comparisons to Mitt Romney’s 2012 line about 47% of Americans on government dole supporting Barack Obama and Mr Obama’s 2008 characterisation of downtrodden Pennsylvanians as clinging to guns and religion.
Polls released earlier this week suggest Mr Trump is gaining on Mrs Clinton, and the rivals are neck and neck in the key battleground states of OH and Florida.
That assertion mirrors something the GOP nominee said about himself – one that many people found shocking at the time.
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Tyrone Gale, a Clinton spokesman, rejected Conway’s call on Twitter for an apology by tweeting a New York Times video depicting vulgar and obscene comments made by some Trump supporters at his rallies.
