Hillary Clinton’s team released an ad Tuesday accusing the Trump campaign of courting David Duke and other white supremacists, but the commercial ignores all the times that the GOP ticket has said it wants nothing to do with the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard.
“Trump and Pence’s courting of white supremacists isn’t a game: It’s normalizing racism,” Clinton’s team said on her official Twitter account. “And it’s deplorable.”
The new campaign ad begins with the following text: “Former KKK leader David Duke and the alt-right are deplorable. But for some reason, the Republican ticket struggles to say so.”
The commercial continued, and showed a clip from a CNN interview from earlier this year when the GOP nominee took a pass on condemning Duke, who enthusiastically supports the Trump campaign, and other white nationalists, instead of condemning the former Klansman, Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper he didn’t “know anything about” Duke or white nationalists.
What the Clinton ad doesn’t show, however, is that Trump said later in a follow-up interview that he rejected Duke and his support.
“David Duke is a bad person, who I disavowed on numerous occasions over the years,” Trump said in March on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“I disavowed him. I disavowed the KKK,” the Republican candidate said. “Do you want me to do it again for the 12th time? I disavowed him in the past, I disavow him now.”
The Clinton-produced ad continued, and emphasized two additional moments this week when Indiana Gov. Mike Pence declined to say whether he thinks Duke is deplorable.
“I’m not really sure why the media keeps dropping David Duke’s name,” Pence said Monday evening in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked, “You would call [Duke] a ‘deplorable?'”
“No, I’m not in the name-calling business,” Pence responded.
Later, on Fox News, the Indiana governor declined again to call Duke deplorable, and said instead, “I’m not a name-caller. I don’t play that game.”
Though the Clinton ad highlighted Pence declining twice to use the word “deplorable” against Duke, the commercial also ignored the governor saying in those same interviews that both he and Trump reject Duke and others like him.
“Donald Trump has denounced David Duke repeatedly. We don’t want his support, and we don’t want the support of people who think like him,” Pence said Monday.
The Clinton ad, which edited the moments where both Trump and Pence have said they reject Duke, ended with a final shot at the GOP ticket.
“It’s not a game,” the ad reads. “Tolerating the likes of David Duke is dangerous and deplorable.”
The ad follows on the heels of the Democratic nominee saying last week that “half of Trump supporters [are in] the basket of deplorables.”
This basket includes persons who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it,” she said last Friday evening at a fundraiser in New York City.
The Democratic nominee amended her claim Saturday morning, and said she didn’t mean to say half of Trump’s supporters are “deplorables.” She did, however, stick to her claim that the Trump campaign has attracted a who’s who of unsavory bigots, including David Duke.
On Monday, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine went after Pence for his failure this week to say whether he thinks Duke is a deplorable individual.
“If you cannot call out bigotry, if you cannot call out racism, xenophobia,” Kaine said at a campaign stop in Michigan. “If you cannot call out and stand back and be silent about it, then you are enabling it to grow.
“You are enabling it to become more powerful,” he said.
Like the new Clinton campaign ad, Kaine’s criticism of Pence ignores that the Indiana governor has stated the GOP ticket rejects Duke and others like him.
