Trump demands an apology for Clinton's 'basket of deplorables' attack
Democrat Hillary Clinton should apologize for insulting half of Donald Trump's supporters, the Republican's campaign said Saturday morning on Twitter.
The Trump camp's outrage came in response to comments Clinton made Friday evening while speaking at a fundraiser in New York. "To just be grossly generalistic," she said, "you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up."
After the line made headlines, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted to Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill early Saturday that Clinton should issue an apology. Trump himself took umbrage on Twitter several hours later in his typically blustery style.
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Clinton went on to speak more empathetically of the other half of Trump voters — "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" — but those remarks received considerably less attention. The Democratic nominee has yet to apologize, and per one analysis from The Washington Post, probably won't lose any votes if she refuses to do so.
Update 2:23 p.m.: Hillary Clinton issued a brief statement Saturday in which she apologized for saying "half" of Donald Trump's supporters belong in the deplorable basket. She did not retract her condemnation of Trump's campaign as a "national platform [for] hateful views and voices."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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