In an escalation of the ongoing war of words, Hillary Clinton has virtually painted Donald Trump as a racist who has unleashed a campaign of “prejudice and paranoia”, even as the New York billionaire called her a “bigot” who ran a “vast criminal enterprise out of the State Department”.
Under a relentless attack from Trump for alleged “pay-for-play” operation during her tenure as Secretary of State, Clinton hit back as never before at a campaign event in Nevada on Thursday, accusing her rival of taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party.
Simultaneously, her campaign released a video ad projecting Trump as the candidate of racists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Compiling footage of prominent white supremacist leaders praising Trump, the video included a clip from a TV interview months ago in which Trump failed to denounce the support from former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader David Duke.
Saying Trump’s “disregard for the values that makes our country great is profoundly dangerous”, Clinton commented at her rally in Reno: “We know who Trump is. A few words on a teleprompter won’t change that. He says he wants to ‘Make America great again’, but his real message remains ‘make America hate again’.”
“A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the Internet, should never run our government or command our military,” the Democratic nominee said, adding: “If he doesn’t respect all Americans, how can he serve all AmericansIJ”
While there has always been “a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment’, she said this was the first time that the nominee of a major party was stoking it and giving it a national megaphone. In contrast, previous Republican nominees such as George W. Bush, John McCain and Bob Dole distinguished themselves by keeping fringe elements on a tight leash, she commented.
Pointing to Trump’s earlier “conspiracy theory-laden attempt to prove President Obama was not born in the United States”, she said: “The last thing we need in the Situation Room is a loose cannon who can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, and who buys so easily into racially-tinged rumours,” Clinton’s hard-hitting comments were also seen against the backdrop of Trump’s all-out effort in recent days to reach out to African-American and Hispanic voters by alleging that Clinton treated people of colour just as a voting bloc and claiming that he would bring about a real change in their lives.
Reacting swiftly to Clinton’s speech, Trump slammed her for “pandering to the worst instincts in our society”. “She should be ashamed of herself,” he tweeted.
“What does she do when she can’t defend her recordIJ” Trump asked at his own rally a little earlier in Manchester, New Hampshire. “She lies, and she smears, and she paints decent Americans -- you -- as racists. It’s the oldest play in the Democratic playbook.”