Donald Trump on Thursday night claimed that he doesn’t know what the alt-right is when asked about Hillary Clinton’s charges in a Thursday speech that Trump has embraced those who push white nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim beliefs.
“Nobody even knows what it is, and she didn’t know what it was. This is a term that was just given,” Trump said when CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked if he embraces the alt-right. “There is no alt-right or alt-left. All that I’m embracing is common sense.”
Cooper then noted to Trump that Steve Bannon, a Breitbart executive who now serves as the Trump campaign’s CEO, once said that Breitbart News is “the platform for the alt-right.”
“I don’t know what Steve said,” Trump said in response. “I can only speak for myself.”
Clinton delivered a blistering speech on Thursday, charging that Trump has embraced the alt-right and its members’ racist and xenophobic beliefs.
“Of course, there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, a lot of it arising from racial resentment, but it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone until now,” she said.
Watch part of the interview via CNN:
