Hillary Clinton on Tuesday evening said that she understands why Donald Trump supporters are angry, but she said that Trump’s “dog whistles” are not the solution.
During a town hall in California, Clinton was asked what she would say to a Trump voter and whether she would be “sympathetic.”
“I am sympathetic to a lot of the people attracted by Trump’s message who are feeling really left out and left behind,” Clinton responded. “They have lost faith in their government, in the economy, and certainly in politics.”
But she warned that Trump’s message is detrimental.
“I understand why people are frustrated and even fearful, but don’t look for easy answers and misleading promises that cannot deliver what you’re hoping for,” she said. “The whole slogan, ‘Make America Great Again,’ is code for go back to the time when a lot of people were not included — including women, including African-American and Latinos and a lot of other people — go back to a time when there really was more of a hierarchy instead of a democratized economy where people are really working hard to get ahead.”
Clinton said she is “sympathetic” to Americans who want better job opportunities, but said she is “not sympathetic to the xenophobia, the misogyny, the homophobia, the Islamophobia and all of the other sort of dog whistles that Trump uses to create that fervor among a lot of his supporters.”
Clinton said that Trump has been “inciting violence.”
“That has to be rejected. That is contrary to our values and to how we can get things done as a country,” she said. “We need to be unified not divided. We can have differences, I’m sure we do, all of us, but we can’t allow those differences to draw big wedges between us so that we are paralyzed and looked in gridlock as has been going on far too long in Washington. We got to roll our sleeves up and get to work.”
