Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played fast and loose with the facts on Sunday in an attempt to defend her infamous “deplorables” remark.
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it,” Clinton said at a fundraiser in New York last September. “And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
Clinton attempted to spin that remark — which proved to be one of the pivotal moments of the 2016 campaign — in a CBS interview that aired Sunday morning.
“Why do you think that word ‘deplorable’ was circulating in your mind?” CBS’ Jane Pauley asked Clinton.
“I thought Trump was behaving in a deplorable manner. I thought a lot of his appeals to voters were deplorable. I thought his behavior, as we saw on the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape was deplorable. And there were a large number of people who didn’t care. It did not matter to them,” Clinton said.
But there’s a gaping hole in that defense: Clinton attacked Trump’s “deplorable” supporters on September 9 — almost a full month before the Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape on October 7.
In other words, Trump’s “behavior” on the “Access Hollywood” tape couldn’t have been the reason Clinton associated the word “deplorable” with Trump supporters.
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