Well, we had Obama’s bitter clinger quote, Romney’s 47 percent remarks, and now we have Hillary Clinton saying you can place half of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s supporters in a “basket of deplorables”. “I regret saying “half” – that was wrong”, Clinton said in a statement released Saturday afternoon.
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But she argued that the word “deplorable” was reasonable to describe much of Trump’s campaign.
“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables, ‘” Mrs Clinton said.
Trump is calling Clinton’s comments a “grotesque attack” and questioning how she can be president when “she has such contempt and disdain for so many great Americans”.
So when she makes a mistake – particularly a highly public one, as she did Friday night – it’s magnified.
“To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it”. Those remarks were seized on by Clinton, his primary opponent, as evidence that he was disconnected from many Americans.
The head of the Republican National Committee is describing Hillary Clinton’s description of Donald Trump supporters as “insulting”. At first Trump chose not to indulge the crowds at his rallies who chanted “lock her up” in July, but he subsequently reconsidered, telling an audience in late July, “I’m starting to agree with you”.
Clinton’s campaign is happy to have a debate about its belief that Trump’s movement is animated by racism, Democrats close to the campaign said Saturday.
She reiterated that point in her statement Saturday, saying many of Trump’s supporters are “hard-working Americans” who feel marginalized.
This woman is trying to increase her bipartisan appeal…by unabashedly pushing a progressive agenda-and now, claims that half of GOP voters supporting Trump are deplorable.
“Because she’s being so protected, she could walk into this arena right now and shoot somebody with 20,000 people watching right smack in the middle of the heart and she wouldn’t be prosecuted, OK?” he said.
During his speech Friday night in Pensacola, Trump strayed from prepared remarks to suggest that Clinton is so immune from prosecution she could get away with murder.
Clinton’s rhetorical stumble came as the candidates head into the final two months of the campaign, with Trump trying to make up ground before the November 8 election.
According to average ticket prices and attendance figures provided by the campaign, Clinton raised around $6 million at the fundraiser, only the sixth she has opened to press.
And while Clinton did say she regretted the comment, she did not apologize to people she may have offended. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.
The other basket of Mr Trump’s supporters constituted individuals desperate for change who felt let down by the government and the economy, Mrs Clinton added. Obama said that small-town voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”. When she took the stage to introduce Barbra Streisand at the NY event, it was only the sixth time her pool of traveling reporters had been allowed into one of her over 330 finance events.
Donald Trump says he’ll be in St. Louis later Saturday to attend the funeral of Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative activist who helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and founded the Eagle Forum political group.
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Trump noted that Schlafly rooted for the underdog, and “the idea that so-called little people, or the little person that she loved so much, could beat the system – often times, the rigged system”.
