By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2024-09-26 15:53:45 | Updated at 2024-09-30 19:30:25
4 days ago
Hillary Clinton is not backing down from her most famous attack on Donald Trump's supporters.
She ignited their anger in 2016 when she said half of them belonged in a 'basketful of deplorables,' comments which were then used against her to show her as not just out of touch but hostile towards white, working class voters.
Eight years after losing that election, she admits the epithet was 'bad politics' but wonders whether she should have gone further.
'I was talking about the people who are drawn to his racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia—you name it,' she writes in her new book, "Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty" excerpted by the Washington Post. 'The people for whom his bigotry is a feature, not a bug.
'It was an unfortunate choice of words and bad politics, but it also got at an important truth.
Hillary Clinton is not backing down from her most famous attack on Donald Trump's supporters, saying that she could even have gone further with her 'basket of deplorables' line
'Just look at everything that has happened in the years since, from Charlottesville to Jan. 6.
'The masks have come off, and if anything, "deplorable" is too kind a word for the hate and violent extremism we've seen from some Trump supporters.'
At the time, most of the rest of her remarks were lost in the storm triggered by the word 'deplorables.'
It became a badge of honor for Trump fans, turned into T-shirts, hats and memes.
Clinton lost the electoral college a little more than a month later, but triumphed in the popular vote.
She said she felt vindicated in her analysis of the rise of hate under Trump, and recounted how a newspaper editor had contacted her in 2022 to see if she would revisit the term in the wake of a mass shooting.
A gunman in Buffalo shot dead black shoppers at a supermarket, apparently influenced by the 'great replacement' conspiracy theory, spread by Trump allies such as then Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson.
'The newspaper editor said that he and his colleagues spent a half-hour at their editorial meeting talking about this report, and "the notion that the most racist show on cable news is also the most popular stuck with a lot of us,'" she writes.
The insult became a badge of honor for Trump supporters, turned into T-shirts and hats
'Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty' was published by Simon & Schuster on September 17
'Several editors, he said, brought up my "deplorables" comment and "how prescient" I had been.'
She turned down the offer, she continues, because she did not want to write about it through the lens of a six-year-old controversy.
'I do wish that back in 2016, people had heard the rest of my comments and not just the word "deplorables," she writes.
'I also talked about the other half of Trump supporters, "people who feel that 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."'
But she says she regrets describing most of the deplorables as 'irredeemable.'
