When Hillary Clinton called some Trump supporters "deplorable," the media reaction was often critical, which is always predictable. But the context of her quote was mostly ignored—of course. Here it is:
We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
[Laughter/applause]
The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
The Trump campaign, of course, is taking her words completely out of context to make it seem she disparaged half of all Americans, or hard-working Americans, or whatever. But she was very clear that she meant only certain Trump supporters. To emphasize:
Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
In other words, they are very specific subset, and a subset of the subset that is Trump supporters. But they are not America, and they are not representative of most Americans. Trump himself has actually disparaged broad swaths of Americans, who together comprise well more than the majority.
He has insulted immigrants from Mexico:
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best," Trump said in his announcement speech last June, after famously gliding down the escalator into the Trump Tower lobby. "They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
And African Americans:
After an African-American protester was attached at a Trump rally in Alabama for shouting “Black lives matter,” Trump said, “maybe he should have been roughed up.” At the time, he was also telling people to “get him the hell out of here.” Trump also tweeted an image of false crime statistics that said most killings were by blacks. It included an image of a black man in army pants and bandanas covering his face holding a gun up.
In fact, his bigotry is so extensive and well-documented that lists have been compiled.
He aimed at the disabled:
Trump's most recent offense came this week as he apparently mocked a reporter with a disability. At a rally Tuesday night, Trump waved his arms in a way that evoked the disability of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski. Kovaleski has a chronic condition called arthrogryposis, which limits the movement of his arms. Trump was talking about comments made by Kovaleski at the time he moved his arms and bent his hands mockingly. Amid calls to apologize, Trump denied even knowing who Kavelski was, but Kovaleski says he covered Trump closely for years -- interviewing him at least 12 times --and that they were, at one point, on a first-name basis.
He didn’t spare women:
Donald Trump has insulted women for decades.
Even though he received multiple deferments to keep him out of war, Trump even disparaged those who went and became prisoners of war:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump slammed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a decorated Vietnam War veteran, on Saturday by saying McCain was not a war hero because he was captured by the North Vietnamese.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said. Sarcastically, Trump quipped, “He’s a war hero because he was captured.” Then, he added, “I like people that weren’t captured.”
Of course, it’s easy not to get captured when you don’t go at all. And he has no more respect for military leaders:
“I think under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble. They have been reduced to a point where it’s embarrassing to our country,” Trump said.
Here’s what he had to say about Jews (with yet another insult to African-Americans):
Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. No one else.
And, of course, his plans for Muslims are chilling:
“We’re going to have to do thing that we never did before,” he said during a Yahoo interview. “Some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,” Trump said.
“Certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy,” he added. “We’re going to have to do things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
Trump would not rule out warrantless searches in his plans for increased surveillance of the nation’s Muslims, Yahoo reported Thursday.
He also remained open toward registering U.S. Muslims in a database or giving them special identification identifying their faith, the news outlet added
And then there is his general disdain for the poor:
My entire life, I've watched politicians bragging about how poor they are, how they came from nothing, how poor their parents and grandparents were. And I said to myself, if they can stay so poor for so many generations, maybe this isn't the kind of person we want to be electing to higher office. How smart can they be? They're morons. There's a perception that voters like poverty. I don't like poverty. Usually, there's a reason for poverty. Do you want someone who gets to be president and that's literally the highest paying job he's ever had?
Apparently, they weren’t smart enough to be born into a family of millionaires.
And given the flat-out lie Trump and his supporters have promoted that Clinton was insulting half of all Americans, it’s no surprise that he has done exactly that:
Despite Trump's purported outrage over the Clinton remark, the mogul has engaged in his own demonization of Americans that has echoed the "47 percent" comment that landed Mitt Romney in trouble during the 2012 campaign. More than once, the reality television celebrity has dismissed tens of millions of Americans—up to half of all Americans—as shiftless people with no desire to work. During a June 2015 interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Trump declared:
The problem we have right now—we have a society that sits back and says we don't have to do anything. Eventually, the 50 percent cannot carry—and it's unfair to them—but cannot carry the other 50 percent.
Trump had expressed this view before. During a January 2015, interview with Kasie Hunt of MSNBC, he proclaimed, "We have a tremendous amount of people in this country that don't want to work. They have no inclination to work."
To reiterate, despite the media misrepresentations and the typical dishonesty from the Trump campaign, Clinton wasn't calling broad swaths of Americans “deplorable.” She was referring to a very specific group—which happens to constitute a very large core of Trump's supporters. And she was right. Last weekend, I catalogued numerous examples of the deplorable behavior and deplorable views espoused by large numbers of Trump supporters. Karoli Kuns of Crooks And Liars did the same. America's Voice even offers a Hate Map documenting where and when Trump and his supporters have harassed people of color.
And while many in the traditional media were getting the vapors over Clinton's statement, some stood out and above their peers by similarly documenting the validity of her words. Among them were the Washington Post's Dana Milbank:
Hillary Clinton may have been unwise to say half of Donald Trump’s supporters are racists and other “deplorables.” But she wasn’t wrong.
If anything, when it comes to Trump’s racist support, she might have low-balled the number.
To back this claim, he cited research from American National Election Studies, the Pew Research Center, Washington Post pollsters, and University of California at Irvine political scientist Michael Tesler.
The Economist also provided data, although its write-up was remarkable mostly for its hedges.
Jonathan Chait pointed to the reality behind the claim that Clinton had made a gaffe:
Clinton controversially described half of Trump’s supporters as “irredeemable.” Trump earlier this year framed the same idea in a more colorful and perhaps more damning way: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Both statements reflect the same underlying truth: Trump enjoys a hard-core support that lies beyond persuasion, utterly immune to even the starkest factual evidence. Clinton committed a gaffe because she acknowledged a reality that literally every other person in America, including Donald Trump himself, is permitted to speak aloud.
Esquire's Charlie Pierce lambasted the entire culture that created the Trump dystopia, and the concomitant refusal to call it for what it is:
Hell, we've been grading Republicans on a curve for decades. We graded Reagan on a curve when he burbled about trees and air pollution. We graded him on a curve during Iran Contra on the grounds that he was too dim to know what was going on around him. We graded W on a curve for the whole 2000 campaign when he didn't know Utah from Uzbekistan, but Al Gore knew too much stuff and what fun was he, anyway? We graded Republicans on a curve when they attached themselves to the remnants of American apartheid, when they played footsie with the militias out west and with the heirs to the White Citizens Councils in the South. We graded them on a curve every time they won a campaign behind Karl Rove or Lee Atwater or the late Terry Dolan back in the 1970s. We talked about how they were "reaching out" to disillusioned white voters who'd suffered in the changing economy, as though African-American workers didn't get slugged harder than anyone else by deindustrialization. We pretended not to notice how racial animus was the accelerant for the fire of discontent in the "Reagan Democrats." That was, and is, grading on a moral curve.
We graded Republicans on a intellectual curve when they embraced a fundamentalist splinter of American Protestantism and brought themselves to a pass in which they are the 21st Century Know Nothings. They have followed movement conservatism to the point where they can ignore science and promote creationism and supply side economic foolishness simply because they can sell it to the same audiences that gobble up the red meat that's been marinating since George Wallace ran for president. Because they are graded on a curve, they can still claim to be shocked when the purist product of all of that work hijacks the nomination and gives the entire game away. Of course, Trump has been graded on a curve. If the electorate hadn't graded modern conservatism on an intellectual curve, it would've flunked out of Human College decades ago.
It is timidity now that grades this ridiculous man running this ridiculous campaign on the biggest curve of all—the timidity of a people who have declined the responsibilities of serious citizenship and the abdication of its duty under the Constitution of a putatively free press too timid to call them on it. That is the political correctness that truly is hurting the country and may yet hurt it beyond all repair. There's only one candidate now running however gingerly against that.
Ta-Nehisi Coates also blasted the media, pointing to the extremist blog that conquered them and gave Trump one of his top campaign aides:
Indeed, what Breitbart understood, what his spiritual heir Donald Trump has banked on, what Hillary Clinton’s recent pillorying has clarified, is that white grievance, no matter how ill-founded, can never be humiliating nor disqualifying. On the contrary, it is a right to be respected at every level of American society from the beer-hall to the penthouse to the newsroom.
The comment was “a self-inflicted wound” claimed the Washington Post reporter Dan Balz. “It was very close to the dictionary definition of bigoted,” asserted John Heilemann. My colleague Ron Fournier and the Post’s Aaron Blake were both taken aback by the implicit math of Clinton’s statement. “Clinton appeared to be slapping the ‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic’ label on about 20 percent of the country,” wrote Blake in a post whose headline echoed that of the Trump campaign manager’s website. “That's no small thing.” Whether or not it was a false thing remained uninvestigated.
The media’s criticism of Clinton’s claim has been matched in vehemence only by their allergy to exploring it. “Candidates should not be sociologists,” glibly asserted David Brooks on Meet The Press. I’m not sure why not, but certainly journalists who broadcast their opinions to the nation should have to evince something more than a superficial curiosity. It is easy enough to look into Clinton’s claim and verify it or falsify it. The numbers are all around us. And the story need not end there. A curious journalist might ask what those numbers mean, or even push further, and ask what it means that the ranks of the Democratic Party are not totally free of their own deplorables.
But they were among the few outliers. And in the following days, the Trump campaign and Trump's supporters continued to prove Clinton right. Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, distinguished himself by demonstrating his own sense of political propriety. When uncharacteristically pushed by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on whether or not the descriptor applies to Trump supporter David Duke:
First, Pence dodged.
“I’m not really sure why the media keeps dropping David Duke’s name,” Pence said. “Donald Trump has denounced David Duke repeatedly. We don’t want his support and we don’t want the support of people who think like him.” (Trump initially declined several opportunities to distance himself from Duke. White nationalists wrote on hate websites that they interpreted Trump’s behavior as a tacit show of support.)
Blitzer pushed. “Well, you’d call him a deplorable?” he asked Pence.
“No, I’m not in the name-calling business,” the vice-presidential candidate responded, proving that no question is too easy.
They were talking about this guy, the one holding the Confederate flag.
Which won Pence plaudits from Duke and his ideological allies. And while trying to rationalize his and Trump’s bizarre defenses of Vladimir Putin:
Mr. Pence insisted that he and Mr. Trump were trying to belittle President Obama rather than to laud Mr. Putin.
Pence wants to belittle President Obama, but he doesn’t want to call this guy names.
Are we deplorable yet?
But of course, the Trump-era GOP continued to provide other examples of the behavior Clinton identified. There was Kentucky’s Republican Gov. Matt Bevin:
“I want us to be able to fight ideologically, mentally, spiritually, economically, so that we don’t have to do it physically,” Bevin said during his speech at the Values Voter Summit in Washington. “But that may, in fact, be the case.”
Bevin went on to say that he believed the U.S. would survive a Hillary Clinton presidency, but it might require bloodshed.
“The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood. Of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots,” he said. “Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something, that we through our apathy and our indifference have given away. Don’t let it happen.”
Then Trump’s son weighed in:
Donald Trump Jr. on Thursday suggested the media has helped Hillary Clinton by letting her “slide” on “every lie” and said that if Republicans did the same, the media would be “warming up the gas chamber” for them.
Which wasn’t a uniquely deplorable event:
Throughout the election, the Trump campaign has been notoriously cozy with white supremacists. On Twitter, Trump has made a habit of retweeting openly racist and anti-Semitic Twitter users who traffic in neo-Nazi propaganda, like when Trump tweeted a graphic of Hillary Clinton laid over a background of money and branded with a Star of David. The image had first appeared on an anti-Semitic, white supremacist message board; the Trump campaign insisted that it was a “Sheriff’s star.”
He’s also adopted their rhetoric, like when he derisively called Hillary Clinton “Angela Merkel,” a line of attack that initially baffled political analysts but can be found verbatim on white supremacist forums like the neo-Nazi site Stormfront.
Nor does the cozy relationship end with the elder Trump. Over the weekend, Trump Jr. shared a meme frequently used by white supremacists casting Trump and his surrogates as “The Deplorables” alongside “Pepe the Frog,” a caricature co-opted by the alt-right and used to promote white nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism.
And Trump himself once again resorted to caricaturing and stereotyping.
And yet another act of violence at a Trump rally:
Protesters are nothing new at Trump rallies, but before a group could be escorted out of U.S. Cellular Center here Monday evening, a man from the crowd went over to violently confront them.
NBC News video of the incident shows the man with his hands on a protester's neck. Moments later, his hands furled into fists, the man lobbed a blow at the protester.
After the one protester was escorted out, the man pulled another toward him and shouted back and forth with a third, female protester while a member of Trump's advance team held him back.
And—you guessed it—more violence outside a Trump rally.
And Trump himself mocking Hillary Clinton’s illness from bacterial pneumonia, which she had attempted to brave through to attend New York’s September 11 memorial.
And because he is who he is, Trump couldn’t help but delve again into the sewage of birtherism:
On Thursday night Donald Trump spokesman Jason Miller sent out a statement declaring that the Republican presidential nominee believes that President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Miller's statement credited Trump with heroically pushing Obama to release his long-form birth certificate in 2011, putting an end to a "vicious and conniving" smear first crafted by Hillary Clinton in 2008.
Of course.
Indeed, virtually every line of the statement is a lie.
And Trump himself had a different story:
Trump refused to say whether he believes Obama was born in Hawaii.
“I’ll answer that question at the right time,” Trump said. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”
Why is there a right time or wrong time? What is so hard about stating an obvious truth? Why did he question Obama’s birth status in the first place?
This is Donald Trump.
And that was just a small part of a very full day for Trump.
Just don't call any of this "deplorable.” That would be bad. Certainly, that would be much worse than the violence, the bigotry, the pettiness, and the empowering of the most extreme elements in American society. That’s exactly what Hillary Clinton was identifying—because the media won’t.
There is so much that is so disturbing about this election year, but nothing has been worse than the media’s normalizing of Trump’s extremism. Hillary Clinton wasn’t wrong. She was too kind. And she was far too kind in not identifying the media’s deliberate role in enabling and empowering and legitimizing Trump. They have been deplorable. As I wrote three weeks ago: If fascism ever does come to America, the media will be goose-stepping right in line.