The left-leaning New York Times editorial board is coming out against Hillary Clinton for her controversial comment in which she lumped half of Donald Trump supporters into what she called a “basket of deplorables.”
The Times said the remark was an example of a candidate having “spent more and more time cocooned with their wealthiest supporters” and having made herself “vulnerable to a particular kind of influence. Not just the kind journalists are ever on the watch for — the classic quid pro quo — but a more subtle form, a cultural form that tends to be heard and not seen.”
During a fundraising event last weekend, the Democratic nominee said her opponent had welcomed “irredeemable” voters into the mainstream who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.”
She later walked back the comment, saying that quantifying it as “half” of Trump’s supporters was an overstatement.
The Times said the gaffe, which many said appeared to have been scripted, was similar to Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remark in 2012.
“[R]eal damage had been done,” the paper said of Clinton’s comment. “In wooing one group of voters — in reading some members of her elite audience, and reflecting their feelings back to them, and perhaps revealing her own — she had written off another one as ‘irredeemable,'” the Times wrote. “This is what happens when candidates spend so much time in what F. Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the consoling proximity of millionaires.'”
