Bill Clinton urged supporters of his wife Tuesday to refrain from attacking Donald Trump supporters, and encouraged them instead to kill the GOP nominee’s base with kindness.
“Do not greet them with the anger they often display towards us,” the former president said Tuesday at a campaign stop in Rocky Mountain, N.C. “Love them to death. Look at them and say, ‘We need you.'”
The former president frequently references Trump’s base during campaign stump speeches, and he has more recently referred to the Republican candidate’s supporters in rather unflattering terms.
“The other guy’s base is what I grew up in,” Clinton said earlier this month at a campaign stop in Fort Myers, Fla. “You know, I’m basically your standard redneck.”
He has also suggested Trump‘s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan is an obvious dog whistle to white Southerners.
“I’m a white Southerner, I remember what it was like when somebody said they were going to make America great again,” Clinton said two weeks ago at a campaign stop in Indianola, Iowa. “They’re basically said, ‘Here’s your tobacco, here’s your shotgun, you’re in charge.'”
Earlier, during a campaign event in Pittsburgh in September, Clinton said, “One candidate says, ‘I’ll make America great again.’ Hey, folks. I’m a white Southerner. I know exactly what that means.”
When the GOP nominee says he wants to “make America great again,” what he is really saying is, “‘I will give you what you had 50 years ago in the economy and I’ll move you back up on the social totem pole and give you somebody to look down on,'” Clinton said.
“One person is making you mad every day and says, ‘Blame somebody else,'” said the former president, who was born and raised in Arkansas. “And I grew up among the people who seem to like that the best.”
However, the former president’s remarks, which are usually accompanied by self-deprecating remarks about his own background as a white Southerner, are usually meant to urge empathy for Trump supporters rather than scorn.
On Tuesday, Clinton again encouraged supporters to reach out to Trump voters.
“When you meet people who are supporting Hillary’s opponent, and you look in their eyes and you know they’re hurting. And you know what drove them to this,” Clinton said in North Carolina. “They, too, get up every morning and look in the mirror and think, ‘All of my tomorrows are going to be like today. I don’t have the power to change my tomorrows. I don’t have the power to help my kids. There must be something wrong.'”
“Tell them, ‘Yeah, something’s wrong. But you don’t want to choose somebody who is the living embodiment of what’s wrong when you got another person who is the living embodiment of what we can make right,'” he said.
