While New York Magazine went with the headline: “Matt Lauer’s Pathetic Interview of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Is the Scariest Thing I’ve Seen in This Campaign”.
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Ahead of the forum, Trump rolled out a new plan to boost military spending by tens of billions of dollars, including major increases in the number of active troops, fighter planes, Navy ships and submarines.
Asked to square his request for military options with his harsh criticism of the current crop of generals, Trump said simply: “They’ll probably be different generals”. Now he says his rival Hillary Clinton could shoot someone in an arena in front of 20,000 people and not be prosecuted.
“They haven’t created any jobs other than lobbyists, maybe a few people to delete some emails”, he said, reiterating a point he made on Twitter earlier that day. She cites his calls to stop Muslim immigration to the USA and to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, as well as his past characterizations of Mexican immigrants as rapists and his pledge to build and force Mexico to pay for a border wall, which Mexico’s president has said is a non-starter.
He also labeled her as “unstable” and “trigger-happy”.
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”.
Weeks before the 2012 election, Republican Mitt Romney landed in hot water for saying that 47 percent of the public would vote for President Barack Obama “no matter what” because they depended on government benefits and his job was “not to worry about those people”.
The remark was an attempt to explain Mr. Trump’s support, which has him running neck-and-neck with Mrs. Clinton in some recent polls.
In a statement Saturday, a day after Clinton said she regards half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables”, Reince Priebus said Clinton is showing “her outright contempt for ordinary people”.
Trump concluded his brief remarks speaking to Schlafly, saying, “we will never, ever let you down”.
“Hillary Clinton and her super PACs have spent over $130 million on negative political ads, and yet we are virtually tied (or better) in the most recent national polls and leading in numerous important swing states”, said Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s chief fundraiser, in a statement Thursday.
“The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it”.
Attempting to walk back the attack, she stressed in the statement that not all of Mr. Trump’s supporters belonged in the same basket. I’ve already said he is really very much of a leader.
She drew an implicit contrast with Mr Trump when asked for the most important quality a commander in chief must possess, replying: “Steadiness, an absolute rock steadiness, mixed with strength to make the hard decisions”.
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“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables, ‘” Clinton said. “They are saying, ‘Oh please, Allah, make Trump president of America'”. “And I opposed the reckless way Hillary Clinton took us out”.
