James Kirchick writes in the New York Daily News that Hillary Clinton was wrong to claim that only “half” of Donald Trump’s supporters belong in the “basket of deplorables” as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” In Kirchick’s estimation, “It’s closer to 100%.”
Hillary Clinton was way off base Friday night when she claimed that “half” of Donald Trump supporters are “deplorable” racists, sexists and nativists. Unsurprisingly, Trump leapt on the remark, calling it “the worst mistake of the political season,” and Clinton quickly apologized.
She was right to do so. It’s not 50% of Trump supporters who are bigots. It’s closer to 100%.
Let’s first dispense with all of the acknowledged racists, misogynists and anti-Semites who have proudly flocked to the Trump campaign like hooded men to a burning cross. The Republican nominee’s emboldening of the much-discussed “Alt Right,” a euphemism white supremacists have cleverly adopted to mainstream themselves as just another respectable political movement, has given professional racists a prominence in national politics they have not enjoyed since the campaigns of George Wallace.
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