Former President Bill Clinton announced last week that if Hillary Clinton were elected president, the Clinton Foundation would no longer accept foreign and corporate donations, he would step down from its board and he no longer would raise money for the organization.
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Donald Trump confronted head-on allegations that he is racist on Thursday, defending his hard-line approach to immigration while trying to make the case to minority voters that Democrats have abandoned them.
Aides said Clinton will link Trump’s statements about immigration and religion to the rise of a political fringe movement in the United States known as the “alternative right”, which opposes multiculturalism and immigration.
While most show him now trailing Clinton, polls also show that voters see Trump as a strong business leader who would be able to handle the economy because of that experience. “I want you to hear these words, and remember these words: Shame on you”.
“He wears it like a crown – Make America Great Again – but Trump made his shirts in Bangladesh, his ties in China and his suits in Mexico”, a narrator says.
Clinton also warned that Trump has “built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia”, which is “taking hate groups mainstream”.
Trump met Thursday with members of a new Republican Party initiative meant to train young – and largely minority – volunteers to drive up voter turnout among their peers.
Bannon told the magazine Mother Jones during the Republican National Convention last month that the website was “the platform for the alt-right”, a brand of US political conservatism associated with white nationalism.
Clinton’s campaign on Thursday tweeted the ad, which featured people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan pledging support for Trump and showed Trump campaign signs next to Confederate flags.
Trump also said that he’ll give an immigration speech “over the next week or two” to clarify his wavering stance on the issue. But recently he has suggested he could soften those positions. His new campaign CEO, Stephen Bannon, was the executive chairman of the conservative Breitbart News site, which is a favorite of alt-right supporters.
“She lies, she smears, she paints decent Americans as racists”, said Trump, who then defended some of the core – and to some people, divisive – ideas of his candidacy. “I call on Hillary Clinton to disavow this video and her campaign for this sickening act that has no place in our world”, he said.
The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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“This type of rhetoric and repulsive advertising is revolting and completely beyond the pale”, Mark Burns, an African-American pastor who supports Trump, said in a statement.
