Think of it as a non-apology apology. Hillary Clinton made it clear Saturday that there was one part of the comments she made at an LGBT fundraiser on Friday night that she regrets and that was qualifying the number of Trump supporters who were part of the “basket of deplorables.” She pretty much stood by everything else.
“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong,” Clinton said in a statement released Saturday afternoon. “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.”
The “half” portion of the remark is precisely what riled people up so much. After all, she had made the comparison before, even using the “deplorables” language but she seems to have never before attached any kind of numerical value to that statement. With her statement she’s saying that no, she doesn’t actually believe that around 20 percent of Americans are part of “a basket of deplorables.” But she used the opportunity to hammer home the idea that Trump is inciting racists and bigots. “I won’t stop calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric in this campaign,” Clinton said.
The non-apology apology obviously was not enough for Trump who quickly attacked Clinton. “Isn’t it disgraceful that Hillary Clinton makes the worst mistake of the political season and instead of owning up to this grotesque attack on American voters, she tries to turn it around with a pathetic rehash of the words and insults used in her failing campaign? For the first time in a long while, her true feelings came out, showing bigotry and hatred for millions of Americans,” he said. “How can she be President of our country when she has such contempt and disdain for so many great Americans?”
Trump also continued the Republican effort to turn the words into Clinton’s “47 percent” moment by retweeting a 2012 tweet from President Obama: “We need a President who is fighting for all Americans, not one who writes off nearly half the country.”
