Pence was answering a question about Hillary Clinton’s Friday statement that “half” of the Republican nominee’s supporters are a “basket of deplorables” when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer tossed him a curveball.
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“We don’t want his support and we don’t want the support of the people who think like him”, Pence initially said, but he punted on condemning Duke specifically.
“I’m not really sure why the media keeps dropping David Duke’s name”. “The millions of people who support Donald Trump around this country are not a basket of anything”.
But that didn’t stop the Democratic presidential nominee from jumping on Pence’s refusal to characterize a former leader of the KKK as “deplorable”. “I’m not in the name-calling business”, Pence said to Wolf. “You know me better than that”.
Blitzer recounted Clinton’s comments and appeared to throw Duke’s name into the question nearly as an afterthought, a settled case of a clearly deplorable human, right? In the affair surrounding a Trump campaign tweet depicting Clinton against a background of dollar bills and with a Star of David reading “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”, Duke retweeted “Absolutely true”. “We don’t want his support, and we don’t want the support of people who think like that”. David Duke is deplorable.
Trump himself faced aggressive criticism earlier this after taking several days to disavow the support from Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard.
Pressed as to why Trump would not release topline information about previous returns now – which would not interfere with the audit process – Pence said Trump would release his returns “in totality” and “not parse them out piece by piece”.
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“It’s inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country”, Trump’s running mate told CNN.
