‘Hate’ looming large in U.S. vote

Clinton, Trump trade allegations of racism, bigotry

The race for the White House reached fever pitch Thursday as the candidates attacked each other over the issue of race in extraordinary back-to-back speeches.

“Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia,” Hillary Clinton said in Reno, Nev. “He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties. His disregard for the values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous.”

Clinton devoted a whole speech to depicting Trump as a racist, reaching way back to his first appearance in a major newspaper story: It was 1973, and he was fighting a federal lawsuit for refusing to rent apartments to black people.

“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,” Clinton said.

“Of course there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment. But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now.”

Trump has begun pushing for the black and Hispanic votes under the unorthodox headline, “What do you have to lose?” Addressing that question, Clinton said, “It really does take a lot of nerve to ask people he’s ignored and mistreated for decades, ‘What do you have to lose?’

“Because the answer is, ‘Everything.’ ”

Across the country in Manchester, N.H., Trump said Clinton was trying to deflect scrutiny of her use of private email and conflicts of interest with her family’s foundation during her time as secretary of state.

He called it the most “brazen attempts at distraction in the history of politics,” and that her allegations were an insult to “the millions of decent Americans” backing his campaign.

People who want their country’s border secured “are not racists,” Trump said. Wanting to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico “doesn’t make you a racist, it makes you smart.” And he said that “people who speak out against radical Islam and who warn about refugees are not Islamophobes.”

“It’s the oldest play in the Democratic playbook,” Trump said. “When Democratic policies fail, they are left with only this one tired argument: ‘You’re racist. You’re racist. You’re racist.’ They keep saying it. It’s a tired, disgusting argument and it’s so totally predictable.”

On Wednesday night, Trump claimed Clinton was a “bigot” who viewed minorities “only as votes, not as human beings.”

Clinton’s decision to take on the topic of race comes as Trump, trailing in national and battleground state polls and rejected by a growing list of establishment Republicans, has shifted to talking about the plight of minorities in the U.S. and backing away from some of the harsh rhetoric on immigration that he used in his primary campaign. It also comes as Clinton confronts ongoing questions about her use of personal email, and potential conflicts stemming from her family’s charitable foundation. Even as he delivered a pre-emptive response to Clinton, Trump kept a focus on that issue.

“Hillary Clinton ran the State Department like a personal hedge fund,” Trump said in Manchester. “Access and favours were sold for cash,” he said, adding that Clinton’s actions had “all the elements of a major criminal enterprise.”

“It’s Watergate all over again,” he said.

Trump last week hired Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, as chief executive officer of his campaign. The conservative website has assumed a central role in the alt-right movement. Bannon, in a July interview with left-leaning magazine Mother Jones, called the website “the platform for the alt-right.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the term alt-right was coined in 2008 by Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute. The Washingtonbased group describes itself as “an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.”

The National Policy Institute said in a statement on Thursday that it has no involvement with the Trump campaign or Breitbart.com.