Last Friday night Hillary Clinton wrote off half of Trump’s backers as a “basket of deplorables.”
The Democratic presidential nominee made the comments at an LGBT fundraising event in New York City, and by the next morning the Trump campaign was demanding an apology.
Here's what she said:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? (Crowd laughs and applauds.) The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.”
Trump now is moving, through television ads and speeches, to seize the brewing resentment among voters over Clinton’s remarks.
Although she went on to characterize other Trump supporters as people who feel powerless, left behind in the economy and desperate for change, the backlash was immediate. Within hours, Clinton sought to dial back, though not retract, her statement.
“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that's never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ -- that was wrong," Clinton said in a statement released Saturday afternoon.
She went on to redirect her criticism toward Trump himself for making appeals to bigotry and embracing the support of the white nationalist “alt-right” movement. But Clinton's comments are kept alive in the media and vociferously within the Trump campaign.
(Source: Bloomberg.com and Politico.com. )
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