From NY Post: Hillary Clinton said Friday night that half of the supporters for her rival Donald Trump are a “basket of deplorables.”
Clinton made the remarks at an LGBT fundraiser in Manhattan and urged supporters to “stage an intervention” if they have friends who might vote Trump.
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables,’” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”
Clinton also charged that Trump has “given voice” to white nationalist and anti-Semitic ideas by re-tweeting their “rhetoric.’’
The Trump campaign said that with the remarks Clinton “revealed her true contempt for everyday Americans.”
Of course, Hillary is now backtracking on that statement. The hashtag #basketofdeplorables was trending yesterday on Twitter. So Hillary had to reply. From MSN:
“Clinton’s aides defended her efforts to define a significant chunk of Trump’s supporters as out of step with American values, and the candidate issued a statement Saturday afternoon saying she regretted using the word “half” to describe those supporters.
“That was wrong,” Clinton said. “But let’s be clear, what’s really ‘deplorable’ is that Donald Trump hired a major advocate for the so-called ‘alt-right’ movement to run his campaign and that David Duke and other white supremacists see him as a champion of their values.”
In her remarks at the fundraiser, Clinton also called for empathy for the other “half” of Trump’s supporters.
“That other basket of people are 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,” Clinton said. “It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from.
“They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different — they won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end,” she continued. “Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
DCG
