Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Sure. But they also notice when educated professionals jeer at their lifestyle and values with contempt. People don’t respond well to being called idiots, bigots, etc. Clinton’s “deplorables” comment was one of the worst own-goals in modern political history.
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Hillary Clinton didn't call all Trump supporters deplorables. In fact, she
very explicitly said exactly the opposite: that many of them were decent Americans who felt the system had failed them. Here's her full quote:
Quote:
You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are 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. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
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Nowhere in that quote does Clinton "jeer at their lifestyle" or "call them idiots". One could maybe quibble that saying exactly half of Trump supporters belong to Basket A and the other half to Basket B is possibly inaccurate when it might actually be 60-40 or 25-75 or whatever other ratio, but other than that everything she said is factually accurate. There
are genuinely horrible people who support Trump. He
did (and still does) amplify their voices and give legitimacy to truly abhorrent views that other Republican candidates would have previously distanced themselves from.