Clinton To Trump: Stop the ‘Hateful, Mean-Spirited, Divisive Rhetoric’

Hillary Clinton on Friday blasted Donald Trump for failing to correct an audience member at a Thursday town hall who said that President Obama is a Muslim and not American.

“I was appalled, and as you may know, quickly put out a tweet expressing the great disappointment with that kind of rhetoric and calling on him, and anybody else who is seeking the highest office of the land, to start behaving like a president, to show respect and to stand up for the truth,” Clinton said when asked about Trump’s town hall, referencing a tweet she published Thursday night.

After calling Obama a Muslim and suggesting that he was not born in the U.S., the audience member asked Trump about reports of “training camps” for Muslims. Trump responded by saying he would look into it, and did not address the man’s claims about the President.

Speaking in New Hampshire on Friday, Clinton said that Trump “should have known that what that man was asking was not only way out of bounds, it was untrue.

“And he should have from the beginning repudiated that kind of rhetoric, that level of hatefulness in a questioner in an audience that he was appearing before,” she said. “So I would, you know, call on him and call on all of the candidates to stop this descent into the kind of hateful, mean-spirited, divisive rhetoric that we have seen too much of in the last months.

Clinton was then asked how she would have responded to the statement from an audience member.

“Well, I don’t think that person would come to my event. But if that person had been in my event, I would have called him out on it, and I would have said from the very beginning, that has no place in a political discussion like the one we are trying to have here, and not only is it out of place and wrong, it is totally, factually untrue, and to quit impugning the integrity of the President,” she responded.

The former secretary of state said she believes Trump should apologize.