3 contrarian views of Hillary Clinton's 'basket of deplorables' comment

Last Friday, Hillary Clinton said that "to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables," arguing that Donald Trump has lifted up people who are "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it." Clinton later retracted the "half" part, but Republicans pounced, calling this Clinton's version of Mitt Romney's devastating "47 percent" gaffe (though David Corn, the journalist who uncovered Romney's comment, now says Trump has his own 47-percent-like deplorables comment); many Democrats winced. Not everyone thinks Clinton is the one with the "deplorables" problem.

At Politico on Tuesday, chief political columnist Roger Simon took aim at Donald Trump's "twisted interpretation" of Clinton's remark, accusing him of soft bigotry toward the working class. Trump says that Clinton has "viciously demonized" the "cops and soldiers, carpenters and welders... and millions of working-class families who just want a better future," Simon notes. "That is B.S.," he wrote. "I grew up in a working-class household. My father was a truck driver and my mother a housewife (her word). And if any of us kids came home wearing a 'Trump the Bitch' T-shirt, we would have gotten our faces slapped."

If Simon blames Trump, The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates accuses the news media of "a shocking betrayal of the journalistic mission which should urge the revelation of truth as opposed to the propagation of hot takes, Washington jargon, and politics-speak." The political press was quick to slam Clinton's "gaffe," but its "criticism of Clinton’s claim has been matched in vehemence only by their allergy to exploring it." If they had, they might have found evidence that Clinton was right.

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To prove his point, Coates considered a counterfactual: "Had polling showed that relatively few Trump supporters believe black people are lazy and criminally-inclined, if only a tiny minority of Trump supporters believed that Muslims should be banned from the country, if birtherism carried no real weight among them, would journalists decline to point this out as they excoriated her? Of course not." Journalists have long "attacked Hillary Clinton for being evasive and avoiding hard questioning," he said, "and then the second Clinton is forthright and says something revealing," they attack her for "simply for having said it." He elaborated on MSNBC on Monday night:

On Monday's Late Night, Seth Meyers blamed Clinton, but mostly for not remembering that she will always be held to a higher standard than Trump. "Sure, it's patently unfair, but you can't play tit for tat with Donald Trump," he said. Meyers said the election has an "older sister, younger brother dynamic," comparing Trump to Ferris Bueller and Clinton to his older sister, Jeanie. "Trump can cut school, dance on a parade float, and claim to be the Sausage King of Chicago, but you, Hillary, you should know better," Meyers said. "The rules are different for you. Do you know how I know the rules are different for you? You told me." Watch below. Peter Weber