The Democratic presidential candidate came under fire for remarks made at a NY fundraiser late Friday – remarks that unleashed a wave of derision and mockery on social media.
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“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of [Donald Trump’s] supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”.
Clinton, whose remarks came during a Friday night LGBT fundraiser in NY, cast half of her GOP opponent’s supporters as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it”, Buzzfeed News reported.
“And unfortunately there are people like that”. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. “She has given us an insight into an elitist attitude and what the elites think about normal every day, hard-working Americans who are sick and exhausted of what is going on in this country and they are ready for change”. Many millions of Americans are exhausted of being smeared as racists and xenophobes, but they are pretty much all voting for Trump already.
“Up until relatively recently, I think they were under the impression that they could control their neighbor and they didn’t want to crack down because they saw it as a useful card to play”, she said.
The suggested response to surrogates: “Tim Kaine was making the point that she didn’t need to apologize for calling out that Donald Trump has given a platform to the alt-right and its deplorable views”. Perhaps it was nothing more than a “glaring factual error gaffe”, though, it’s worth noting that while Clinton subsequently expressed “regret” for saying “half”, she did not explicitly retract the substance of the claim itself.
“Last night I was “grossly generalistic, ‘ and that’s never a good idea”, Clinton said in her statement”.
This is a developing story.
Vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine told The Washington Post that Clinton’s statement didn’t require an apology.
The Republican vice-presidential nominee said: “The men and women who support Donald Trump’s campaign are hardworking Americans …” 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. But Jamal Simmons, a Democratic consultant, said the remarks probably would not wrest voters from Clinton. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from June, roughly 50 percent of Trump supporters reported viewing African-Americans as more “violent” and “criminal” than whites, with 40 percent or more also saying that blacks were more “lazy” and “rude” than their white counterparts. I will tell you right now, I campaign on a regular basis with Donald Trump.
Trump’s rhetoric, Clinton said, has only fueled the motivations driving ISIS. He wrote: “While Hillary said disgusting things about my supporters, and while many of her supporters will never vote for me, I still respect them all!”
Clinton may have unleashed a whirlwind of fury and frustration that may prove itself to be her undoing on November 8. “Right?” Clinton said to applause and laughter from the crowd of supporters at an LGBT for Hillary fundraiser where Barbra Streisand performed.
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said in a series of tweets after the remarks that Clinton has been talking about the “alternative right”, or “alt-right” movement, which often is associated with efforts on the far right to preserve “white identity”, oppose multiculturalism and defend “Western values”.
“But then she went on to say, ‘Look, there’s also a number of his supporters that have economic anxieties, and we’ve got to speak to those'”.
One key difference between the two is that Romney’s comment might have alienated potential supporters.
-Clinton has called a segment of Trump’s supporters “deplorables” before, most recently in an interview with an Israeli television station earlier this week. John McCain – who was held and tortured in Vietnam for more than five years – was not a war hero because he was captured and when he boasted that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose voters.
“She’s really letting us see about how she really feels about those who don’t support her”, he added.
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David Axelrod, a former chief strategist to Obama who is now a CNN commentator, referenced the controversy over Obama’s “guns and religion” line at a 2008 fundraiser, tweeting, “Fundraiser remarks are treacherous things”.
