Although Clinton has accused Trump of racism before, she has never explicitly called him a racist.
Advertisement
Clinton – who’s said she’s the candidate to unify a divided country- made the comment at an LGBT fundraiser Friday night at a New York City restaurant, with about 1,000 people in attendance.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks to the press after a working session with national security advisers and experts at the New York Historical Society September 9, 2016 in New York City.
Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, a notable Trump critic, tweeted, “Hillary Clinton’s creed: “All men are created equal” – except for those I’ve consigned to the basket of deplorables, who are irredeemable”.
Energized by a raucous and rowdy crowd, Trump often veered from his prepared remarks, offering more provocative declarations of his platform and relishing the extended cheers he regularly received. “They say I have the most loyal people. where I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, ok?”
Later in the rally, he again criticized Clinton over what he said was an aggressive foreign policy.
Clinton made her comments at an LGBT fundraiser in NY late Friday, then walked them back Saturday, saying in a statement that it was “grossly generalistic, and that’s never a good idea”.
“I hear from some of my old intelligence friends that Donald Trump has been engaged in some activities in Russian Federation that Vladimir Putin may be using to blackmail Trump”, McMullin said “There is a lot going on there that I don’t think has come to light fully…” “We are living in a volatile political environment”.
After acknowledging that she was “grossly generalizing”, Clinton said Trump has lifted up people who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it”.
I said today that my message to Hillary Clinton is ‘they’re not a basket of anything-they’re Americans, and they deserve her respect.’ Frankly, anyone who has that low an opinion of millions of Americans should never be elected president of the United States.
She described them as “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change”.
Speaking at an evening fundraiser in NY, the former US secretary of state said Trump had given voice to hateful rhetoric from such individuals through his behavior as a candidate for the White House.
Both Trump, a native New Yorker, and Clinton, who was senator from NY at the time of the attacks, have agreed to refrain from campaigning Sunday, continuing the tradition of setting aside partisan politics on the somber anniversary. “So I won’t stop calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric in this campaign”.
At the fundraiser, Clinton bemoaned the people she described as “deplorables”, saying “unfortunately there are people like that”.
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill noted a previous speech in which she accused Trump of embracing a brand of US political conservatism associated with white nationalism and nativism known as the “alt-right” movement. He argued that “alt-right” leaders are supporting Trump and “their supporters appear to make up half his crowd when you observe the tone of his events”.
Many of Clinton’s fundraisers have been closed to the media, but her Friday remarks, preceding a performance by singer Barbra Streisand, were open to journalists.
Advertisement
During the 2008 Democratic primary, then-Senator 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”.
