Republicans Lash Out At Clinton Over ‘Basket Of Deplorables’ Remark

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Friday, March 4, 2016, in National Harbor, Md. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
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Even after Hillary Clinton issued a statement tempering her comment calling some of Donald Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables,” Trump continued to lash out at the Democratic nominee on Saturday. And his Republican allies blasted Clinton throughout the day.

“Isn’t it disgraceful that Hillary Clinton makes the worst mistake of the political season and instead of owning up to this grotesque attack on American voters, she tries to turn it around with a pathetic rehash of the words and insults used in her failing campaign? For the first time in a long while, her true feelings came out, showing bigotry and hatred for millions of Americans,” Trump said in a statement Saturday afternoon.

“How can she be President of our country when she has such contempt and disdain for so many great Americans? Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of herself, and this proves beyond a doubt that she is unfit and incapable to serve as President of the United States,” he added.

And throughout the day Saturday, Trump’s Republican allies jumped to his defense.

Clinton on Friday night broke Trump supporters down into two groups, one of which she called the “basket of deplorables.”

“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it,” she said at a fundraiser.

After the Trump campaign called on Clinton to apologize, she softened her comments, but did not fully back down from the remarks.

“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong,” Clinton said in a Saturday afternoon statement.

“But let’s be clear, what’s really ‘deplorable’ is that Donald Trump hired a major advocate for the so-called ‘alt-right’ movement to run his campaign and that David Duke and other white supremacists see him as a champion of their values,” she added. “So I won’t stop calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric in this campaign.”

And her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), said that Clinton did not need to apologize for her comments.

“She said, ‘Look, I’m generalizing here, but a lot of his support is coming from this odd place, that he’s given a platform to the alt-right and white nationalists,’” Kaine told the Washington Post. “But then she went on to say, ‘Look, there’s also a number of his supporters that have economic anxieties, and we’ve got to speak to those.’”

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