“Deplorables” Turns Five Years Old

Of the off-handed comments that took over a political narrative, Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” laugh line about Trump supporters is way up on the list.

That was five years ago. My how young we all were…

WaPo:

On Sept. 9, 2016, Clinton was the opening act for Barbra Streisand at a glitzy fundraiser in New York City. A group of LGBTQ supporters were gathered at Cipriani restaurant, and the Democratic candidate had one job: to fire up her donors.

“I am all that stands between you and the apocalypse,” Clinton told the cheering crowd. She launched into all the things she found “deplorable” about Trump: He threatened marriage equality, cozied up to white supremacists, made racist and sexist remarks — all things she found “so personally offensive.”

She warned there were two months left in the race and no one should assume he wouldn’t be elected anyway. “Just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” There was laughter and applause.

The people in this basket, emboldened by Trump’s tweets, were “irredeemable,” she said. But there was another basket: Trump supporters who just felt the government had let them down and wanted change — and Democrats had to empathize to win these voters.

“Basket of deplorables” was not in Clinton’s prepared remarks. She often improvised in speeches. Reporters jumped on it, as did the Trump campaign, which immediately slammed Clinton for not running “a positive campaign.”

Clinton apologized the next day in a very Clintonesque manner: “I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong,” she said in a statement. What was the magic number? She didn’t say. She did, however, double down on calling out Trump’s bigotry and racism.

“It’s very hard to say you have a message of civility and then turn around and talk about how essentially a quarter of the country is, in your view, a basket of deplorables,” said Jonathan Allen, author of “Shattered,” a study of Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “That is a screeching conflict of her overall message, which is we have a civilized country and we need to be stronger together — that this should be a kinder, gentler, unified country.”

It’s easy to get careless at fundraisers: The crowd is pumped up, the mood hopeful. In April 2008, Barack Obama told a San Francisco donor audience that working-class voters in the Rust Belt “cling to guns or religion” as a way to express their frustrations. (Clinton, in the last days of her failed bid for the Democratic nomination, said she was “taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America. His remarks are elitist and out of touch.”)

Mitt Romney got into trouble for his “47 percent” slip, which was secretly taped during a 2012 fundraiser that was closed to the media. The Republican nominee explained to wealthy donors that almost half of American voters would pick Obama because they were dependent on government handouts. “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” he told the crowd.

Clinton made the classic campaign mistake of playing pundit by explaining strategy to donors. She wasn’t writing off all Trump supporters; those who were scared and jobless might be won over. It was a delicate rhetorical dance: Have compassion for some, be afraid of others.

Trump repeatedly mocked Clinton voters, but his fans never worried it would hurt him. In fact, they loved him for it, as well as his attacks on the media, the candidates in his own party, John McCain’s war record and the judge in one of his lawsuits. “The more offensive and insulting he could be, the happier he was with it,” Allen said.

That was Trump being Trump. Clinton’s deplorables comment, Allen said, seemed to reveal a private thought that she had never dared state in public.