Hillary Clinton has doubled down on remarks made during her 2016 campaign in which she referred to Donald Trump supporters as “Deplorables”, adding that the word is “too kind” for some of his backers.
Writing in the Washington Post, the former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate said that her choice of words had been “unfortunate” and “bad politics” but it “got at an important truth.”
She went on to write that “deplorable is too kind a word for the hate and violent extremism we’ve seen from some Trump supporters.”
At a campaign fundraising event only weeks before the 2016 election, which she went on to lose, Clinton famously said that half of Donald Trump’s supporters were a “basket of deplorables”.
It became one of the best-remembered episodes of that year’s race and is widely seen by political strategists to have harmed her campaign by insulting white, working class voters.
Some 40 days out from the 2024 election, and with the possibility of a second Trump term on the horizon, the former Secretary of State believes that many of the issues which she faced on the campaign trail are as relevant as they were eight years ago.
In a column adapted from her newly published book, Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty, she wrote: “Just look at everything that has happened in the years since, from Charlottesville to Jan. 6”, in a reference to the 2017 “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally and the 2021 Capitol riots.
Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks onstage for a celebration of the release of her new book “Something Lost, Something Gained” at Dolby Theatre on September 20, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. In a Wednesday column for The Washington Post, adapted from the new book, Clinton defended her “basket of deplorables” comment from the 2016 campaign.
Amy Sussman/Getty Images
Clinton garnered 227 electoral college votes to Trump’s 304 in the 2016 election, despite winning the popular vote.
“I was talking about the people who are drawn to his racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia — you name it,” Clinton wrote. “The people for whom [Trump’s] bigotry is a feature, not a bug.”
Clinton claims that she received praise for the “prescience” of her comments from some, and that much of the criticism was due to people focusing on the first half of her statement.
Many, she argues, neglected to mention the “the other basket” of Trump supporters, who she said: “feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they’re just desperate for change.”
Clinton now believes that she has been exonerated by four year’s of Trump presidency, as well as the years since he left the White House.
Referring to the multiple conspiracy theories that surrounded her candidacy, Clinton said that Trump had used his presidency to “traffic in this kind of trash,” and used the conspicuous position of the Oval Office – the “bully pulpit” – “to be an actual bully.”
Do you have a story we should be covering? Do you have any questions about this article? Contact LiveNews@newsweek.com.
