During a speech last Friday at an LGBT event in downtown Manhattan, Hillary Clinton said that half of Donald Trump’s supporters are a “basket of deplorables.” It may have been a serious gaffe for the presidential hopeful, but we think she undercounted the number of deplorables in Trump’s camp.
Let’s look at it this way. Millions of Americans voted for Trump during the primaries, clearly in accord with all of his malicious insults against Mexican Americans, Muslims, including his gestures mocking the disabled. Any and all of the voters who condone this behavior—in our analysis—are unrepentant deplorables.
By deplorables, to read the full text of Clinton’s comment, she was merely talking about those individuals who follow Trump and are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic or Islamophobic, and as we see it, so long as they are comfortable with his negative platform and do not disabuse themselves of his screed they are in his camp and march to his tune.
Those who choose to follow a madman are equally insane. Those who show up and cheer at a Klan rally are just as racist as the Grand Dragon. The Nazis who hailed Hitler were complicit in all of his plans to exterminate the Jews and other minorities.
So, as we see it, Trump is the ringleader of a group of deplorables. They have bought into his absurdities, his inanities, his campaign to make “America great again,” which for us is no more than his desire of retrenchment, taking America back to the days when Jim Crow reigned, an era of inequity that appeals to the David Dukes of the world.
And we were pleased to hear that Clinton is recovering from her ailments and certainly approve of her Twitter Monday assailing Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, who denounced support from David Duke but refused to characterize him as a deplorable. “If you won’t say the KKK is deplorable, you have no business running the country,” she tweeted.
And David Duke is not alone in his hatred and racial animosity.
Several months ago—and we thank Charles Blow of The New York Times for this lead—a Public Policy Polling survey conducted in South Carolina found that 80 percent of likely Trump primary voters supported his proposed ban on Muslims. Moreover, there was a sizable percentage who wished the South had won the Civil War.
We have learned from a number of polls that the perspectives of Black and white Americans are skewed radically apart. When asked about conditions in society, Black and white respondents differ considerably. Two years ago a poll conducted by ABC/Washington Post asked respondents how confident they were that the police are adequately trained to avoid the use of excessive force. Sixty-two percent of the white respondents said they were very confident that the police were; 71 percent of Black respondents said they were not confident about the preparedness of the police.
No doubt, Blacks and whites, particularly those Trumpeteers, will not see eye to eye on who and what a deplorable is. And while Clinton may not have been wise to define and number the deplorables following Trump, we are not running for office and, in fact, we believe there are probably innumerable deplorables out there, more than we can shake a stick at and many of whom would love to stick it to us.