Pence Defends Trump’s Insults By Bringing Up ‘Basket Of Deplorables’

After Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) brought up Donald Trump’s comments about immigrants and women, labeling his bid for president an “insult-driven campaign,” Gov. Mike Pence (R) responded by lamenting that Hillary Clinton described some Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”

“I was listening to the avalanche of insults that were coming out of Sen. Kaine a minute ago,” Pence said. “He says ours is an insult-driven campaign. Did you all just hear that? Ours is an insult-driven campaign?”

“To be honest with you, if Donald Trump had said all the things you said he said in the way you said he said them, he still wouldn’t have a fraction of the insults that Hillary Clinton leveled when she said that half of our supporters were a basket of deplorables,” Pence continued. “She said they were irredeemable, they were not American. I mean, it’s extraordinary.”

Pence said that Trump’s comments are “small potatoes compared to Hillary Clinton calling half of Donald Trump’s supporters a basket of deplorables.”

Clinton said during a September fundraiser that half of Trump supporters were part of a “basket of deplorables.” She described them as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic.” After the Trump campaign pounced on her comments, she apologized for saying that “half” of Trump’s supporters are deplorable, but she did not fully walk back the remark.

Pence’s comments about the “deplorables” came after Kaine listed some of Trump’s insults throughout the campaign.

“Donald Trump during his campaign has called Mexicans rapists and criminals. He’s called women slobs, pigs, dogs, disgusting,” Kaine said. “He attacked an Indiana-born federal judge and said he was unqualified to hear a federal lawsuit because his parents were Mexican. He went after John McCain, a P.O.W., and said he wasn’t a hero because he’d been captured. He said African-Americans are living in hell. And he perpetrated this outrageous and bigoted lie that President Obama is not a U.S. Citizen. If you want to have a society where people are respected and respect laws, you can’t have somebody at the top who demeans every group that he talks about.”