Donald Trump: The Clintons are the "real predators"
Continuing the finger-pointing over which presidential candidate is more racist, Donald Trump launched a social media offensive against Hillary Clinton early Friday, sending out a tweet and an Instagram post alleging that the Democratic nominee and her husband are “the real predators.”
The video compiles footage of Clinton’s controversial line from a 1996 speech she gave in New Hampshire supporting then-President Bill Clinton’s tough-on-crime bill, where she labeled at-risk youth in inner cities as “superpredators.”
“They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators,’” Clinton says in the clip. “No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”
Cue the footage of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s primary election opponent, who blasted her remarks from the mid-’90s as “racist” on a CNN debate stage earlier this year.
Asked in April why Sanders had criticized Clinton’s remarks promoting the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act, the senator responded: “Because it was a racist term and everybody knew it was a racist term.”
Clinton, for her part, has apologized for invoking the term, saying in February of this year that she “shouldn’t have used those words.”
“In that speech, I was talking about the impact violent crime and vicious drug cartels were having on communities across the country and the particular danger they posed to children and families,” Clinton said in a statement, shortly after the 1996 clip resurfaced. “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.”
Trump’s use of the decades-old video is just the latest in a long line of attacks against Clinton, who the GOP nominee has tried in recent days to paint as a “bigot” in a bid for more minority support.
To a local New Hampshire radio station, Trump explained why he believed his opponent espoused bigotry.
“She’s done a terrible job for tremendous numbers of people in this country, and you look at the inner cities, you look at what’s happening, it’s all talk and she’ll work and she’ll talk and – she’ll - that’s all it is. And in the meantime, the inner cities are dying and African Americans and the Hispanics are really taking the brunt of it,” Trump told WMUR in an interview Thursday. “And she knows she’s not going to do anything about it. She talks about fixing the inner cities, she’s been talking about it for 30 years. She hasn’t done anything. And that to me is bigotry.”
Trump continued along the same vein in an interview that aired Thursday on CNN.
“She is a bigot,” Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “She is selling them down the tubes because she’s not doing anything for those communities. She talks a good game. But she doesn’t do anything.”
Asked if he believed Clinton personally hated African Americans, Trump said: “Her policies are bigoted because she knows they’re not going to work.”
The social media posts and interview attacks come less than a day after Clinton pilloried the Trump campaign’s connections with white supremacists and the so-called “alt-right” philosophy.
“There has been a steady stream of bigotry coming from him,” Clinton said during a speech in Reno, Nevada, firing off a list of Trump’s supposed offenses -- not least of which was the recent hiring of Breitbart News chief Steve Bannon, who paved the way for the rise of alt-right racist ideologies on his conservative website, as the Trump campaign’s CEO.
“Of course there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, a lot of it rising from racial resentment,” she said. “But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now.”