For all the deserved flack Donald Trump has received for citing inaccurate news, he literally broke from script Monday to accurately quote the context of Hillary Clinton’s description of some of his supporters as a “basket of deplorables”.
“We have the support of cops and soldiers, carpenters and welders, the young and the old, and millions of working class families who just want a better future, and a good job. These were the people Hillary Clinton so viciously demonized. These were among the countless Americans that Hillary Clinton called deplorable, irredeemable, and un-American,” Trump said during a speech to a National Guard conference Monday.
“She called half of our supporters a ‘basket of deplorables’ in both a speech and in an interview.”
The “half” is a noticeable drop-in. In an advanced copy of the speech released by the Trump campaign, the word “them” replaces the phrase “half of our supporters”—the latter of which is what Clinton actually said during a fundraiser on Friday.
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” she said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”
Clinton carefully retracted the offhanded remark in a statement released Saturday, saying it was “wrong” of her to describe half of Trump’s backers the way she did while still pressing the case against his associations and his behavior.
“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’—that was wrong,” she 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. It’s deplorable that Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia and given a national platform to hateful views and voices, including by retweeting fringe bigots with a few dozen followers and spreading their message to 11 million people.”
