Nominees trade race accusations
A series of racially charged accusations dominated the United States presidential election campaign yesterday, with Democrat Hillary Clinton accusing Donald Trump of ‘‘taking hate groups mainstream’’, while the Republican nominee repeatedly claimed that Clinton is a ‘‘bigot’’ towards African-Americans.
Clinton started the day by releasing a video that featured Ku Klux Klan members and white supremacists touting Trump’s candidacy – then gave an afternoon speech condemning Trump’s racially inflammatory remarks and support within the ‘‘alt-right’’, which she described as an ‘‘emerging racist ideology’’.
‘‘Trump is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters,’’ she said in the speech in Reno. ‘‘It’s a disturbing preview of what kind of president he’d be.’’
Trump, meanwhile, declared in an interview on CNN that Clinton was a bigot – an accusation he first made at a rally in Mississippi on Thursday.
‘‘If you look at what’s happening to the inner cities, you look at what’s happening to African-Americans and Hispanics in this country, where she talks all the time.’’
Clinton’s speech, delivered at a community college in the battleground state of Nevada, focused particularly on Trump’s connection to the alt-right. It’s a movement that predates Trump but has come under new scrutiny in the wake of a leadership shakeup in the Trump campaign that included the installation of Breitbart News head Steve Bannon as the campaign’s chief executive.
Bannon has described Breitbart News as ‘‘the platform for the altright.’’
Clinton also called Trump ‘‘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 dark reaches of the Internet.’’
In his own speech in New Hampshire earlier, Trump tried to discredit Clinton’s argument before she had made it, framing her speech not as an attack on him but as an attack on the ‘‘millions of decent Americans’’ who support him.
He provided a point-by-point defence of some of his most controversial stances – including blocking refugees from entering the country, cracking down on illegal immigration and intensifying policing – saying it was not racist, Islamophobic or hardhearted to want to keep Americans safe.
In recent days, Trump has been aggressively trying to shed the label of racist and has increased the number of minority surrogates speaking on his behalf on cable news and at his rallies.
He is also planning to take trips into urban areas soon to visit churches, charter schools and small businesses in black and Latino communities.