According to the Time Magazine, Hilary Clinton said during the 2016 election campaign: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” In my view those she spoke of were deplorables for the reasons she gave and reasons that stretched beyond their support for discrimination.
She said the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”
“Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well,” she said. https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/
It was not a politically smart thing to say and she apologized for her quantification of the deplorables since she really did not know the number. But she was right. Trump was relying on and stoking the deplorables to win.
Republicans in the Congress who voted to eliminate the health care of millions and voted to give a massive tax cut to wealthy Americans and corporations are moral lepers. And they have failed to live up to their oath of office by supporting the moral monster in the White House. To some extent they have failed because of the deplorable support of the voters in the Republican Party.
But there is more bad news. The New York Times reports this morning that a Gallup Poll released yesterday showed that 60% of Americans hold generally positive views of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. And his overall approval rating is 49%, the highest of his Presidency. I won’t bother to recite his well-known manipulation, lies, and important failures in dealing with this crisis past and present. I will say this: If the Gallop poll is correct, the basket of deplorables filled with people of thundering ignorance is shockingly large. A democracy cannot survive with such rampant stupidity.
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